Jack M. Broughton , Michael J. Broughton , Kasey E. Cole , Daniel M. Dalmas , Joan Brenner Coltrain
{"title":"Late Holocene tule elk (Cervus canadensis nannodes) resource depression and distant patch use in central California: Faunal and isotopic evidence from King Brown and the Emeryville Shellmound","authors":"Jack M. Broughton , Michael J. Broughton , Kasey E. Cole , Daniel M. Dalmas , Joan Brenner Coltrain","doi":"10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101512","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101512","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Previous research has documented declines in the abundance of high-return resources including tule elk (<em>Cervus canadensis nannodes</em>) over the past three millennia in central California, suggesting the occurrence of resource depression. We test the hypothesis that hunting depressed tule elk in this setting by articulating stable isotope analyses from 88 directly dated tule elk specimens with data on the age structure and skeletal part representation from the King Brown and Emeryville Shellmound sites. Late Holocene trends in stable isotopes and modeled climatic variation are inconsistent with climate-based population declines. However, at King Brown, located within the Central Valley and vast tule elk freshwater marsh and grassland habitat, increasing isotopic diversity, a decline in mean age, and increasing abundance of high-utility skeletal elements suggest local depression stimulated the increasing use of distant elk patches. Although faunal trends are consistent with the depression of elk at Emeryville, the site is located on the shore of the San Francisco Bay where limited elk habitat existed, and no evidence of distant elk patch use is indicated. This analysis underscores how human behavioral responses to resource depression can vary in relation to the local ecology as they affect patch use economics for specific prey and demonstrates how such responses can be deciphered through stable isotope and faunal data.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47957,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Archaeology","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101512"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49762161","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cecilia Dal Zovo , César Parcero-Oubiña , A. César González-García , Alejandro Güimil-Fariña
{"title":"Mapping human mobility and analyzing spatial memory: palimpsest landscapes of movement in the Gobi-Altai Mountains, Mongolia","authors":"Cecilia Dal Zovo , César Parcero-Oubiña , A. César González-García , Alejandro Güimil-Fariña","doi":"10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101516","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101516","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The significance of local spatial choices and memory and their impact on mobility networks is scarcely recognised in Mongolian archaeology. Here, we present a mapping strategy aimed at disentangling the landscapes of movement and investigating the materiality that accumulated in the palimpsest of the Ikh Bogd Uul Mountain (Bayankhongor, Mongolia).</p><p>Based on an integrated and diachronic approach, our analysis encompasses a variety of strategies and sources: satellite imagery and historical cartography, a rescaling of the research area and path-centered fieldwork, which we conceptualize as 'linear’ survey. We document Late Prehistoric mounds as well as ‘modern’ springs, pastoral campsites, and paths. They are interpreted as landscape-objects associated with persistent mobility patterns and the construction of local knowledge and identity – in the sense of a <em>nutag</em> or homeland.</p><p>This study thus contributes to expanding the archaeological information available for a remote and scarcely investigated area and enriching the archaeological approach to a complex and highly mobile context over time. It also offers new insights into how ancient mobility contributed to shaping the local landscapes of movement, both in terms of seasonal pastoral shifts and long-distance networks in the Mongolian and Central Eurasian Late Prehistory and afterwards.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47957,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Archaeology","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101516"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49722626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revisiting cremation practices of the Pastoral Neolithic in Kenya","authors":"Lorraine W. Hu","doi":"10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101523","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>As global archaeological studies of cremation increasingly integrate detailed methodology alongside mortuary theory, case studies from sedentary, agricultural societies – most commonly from Europe and North America - still dominate. This paper examines the earliest known cremation tradition from Africa, associated with a period termed the Pastoral Neolithic c. 3300–1200 BP, at the sites of Njoro River Cave, Keringet Cave, and Noomparrua Nkosesia in Kenya. These burial sites contained remains of multiple cremated individuals in settings of caves and subterranean cavities. Using bioarchaeological and contextual analyses, this paper presents site-specific <em>chaînes opératoires</em> to explore variability in funerary processes. Shared traits including the rocky, secluded environments and patterning of ochre staining demonstrate the potential maintenance and transmission of fundamental aspects of cremation ritual knowledge by different mobile communities throughout the Pastoral Neolithic.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47957,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Archaeology","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101523"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49762214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Plant use and peasant politics under Inka and Spanish rule at Ollantaytambo, Peru","authors":"R. Alexander Hunter , Luis Huamán Mesía","doi":"10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101529","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101529","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>In the Andes, successive waves of Inka and Spanish imperialism reshaped local ecologies and transformed agricultural practices between the 14th and 17th centuries. As the Inka (ca. 1450–1532CE) consolidated control over the region they co-opted existing resources, directed the development of new farmland, and imposed new labor obligations on Andean people. In turn, Spanish colonizers (1533-1824CE) introduced foreign flora and fauna, created new tributary regimes, and reorganized agricultural production around forcibly resettled communities and Spanish-owned haciendas (agrarian estates). In this paper, we explore how agricultural workers managed this extended period of upheaval through analysis of botanical data from recent excavations at the site of Simapuqio-Muyupata, in Peru’s Cusco region. We track how agriculturalists living at the site altered patterns of plant use—and, by extension agricultural practice—across the period of Inka and Spanish Colonial governance. These farmers remained reliant on a similar suite of cultivated plants under both political regimes, but shifted practices of land management to conserve labor when confronted with the structural conditions of servitude to Spanish landlords. By altering agricultural practices, these agriculturalists re-shaped the agroecological context in which they lived and worked to ensure survival in the face of political upheaval.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47957,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Archaeology","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101529"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49722476","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Late Maritime Woodland period hunter-fisher-gatherer complexity in the Far Northeast: Toward an historical and contingent approach","authors":"M. Gabriel Hrynick , Matthew W. Betts","doi":"10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101535","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101535","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>We review archaeological research from the Late Maritime Woodland period (1300–550 cal BP) on the Maritime Peninsula and argue that there is substantial evidence for sociocultural and economic hunter-fisher-gatherer complexity prior to the arrival of Europeans. This is relevant because the region was the stage for some of the earliest contacts between Indigenous and European peoples in the Americas, and aspects of sociocultural complexity among the Wabanaki have sometimes been attributed to European contact, a conception which requires exploration. More broadly, we argue that hunter-fisher-gatherer complexity may be conceived of as a suite of practices that hunter-fisher-gatherers deploy in specific contexts to deal with historical or environmental contingencies, and which may have had long histories as seasonal and/or heterarchical practices that are difficult to resolve archaeologically. We suggest that this perspective helps to reframe recent debate around the development of hunter-fisher-gatherer complexity as one that is focused on contingent historical process.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47957,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Archaeology","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101535"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49722393","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pounding the ground for the thunder god: Sounding platforms in the Prehispanic Andes (CE 1000–1532)","authors":"Kevin Lane","doi":"10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101515","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101515","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The past is silent, or mostly so, yet sound can open a window to this same past. Early Spanish colonial ethnohistoric sources from the Andes are littered with references to indigenous dancing and music as an accompaniment to ritual and feasts. Recent archaeological research in the upper Ica Drainage on the late Prehispanic (CE 1000–1532) site of Viejo Sangayaico has revealed an open-air platform potentially prepared as a type of sprung or ‘sounding’ dancefloor which produces a deep percussion-like sound when stepped upon. I interpret this feature as a sounding platform for stomp dancing. The larger site’s association to veneration of Andean lightning and thunder deity suggests that dancing at this location might have been in part attuned to this supernatural entity. Wider ethnohistoric evidence provide a potential parallel into understanding what type of activities were practiced on this platform and site.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47957,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Archaeology","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101515"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49745565","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Remote sensing evidence for third millennium BCE urban form and hydrology at the Mesopotamian city of Lagash (Tell al-Hiba, Iraq)","authors":"Emily Hammer","doi":"10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101531","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101531","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47957,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Archaeology","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101531"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49722397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From the ashes of Bronze Age fires: A framework for comparison across body treatments","authors":"Györgyi Parditka , Paul R. Duffy","doi":"10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101525","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101525","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Archaeologists in the Carpathian Basin are increasingly focused on social variability across the Bronze Age<span> landscape. However, when it comes to mortuary variability, the difference in body treatments (cremation and inhumation) between populations impairs our ability to carry out regional comparisons and appreciate the range of community social organizations. In this paper, we compare mortuary assemblages from three Bronze Age culture areas on the Great Hungarian Plain. In our coarse quantitative framework, we characterize the intensity of funerary distinction as a proxy for complexity and identify structural variation across mortuary programs. We identify both horizontal and vertical differences in funerary assemblages and note horizontal differences that do not necessarily materialize vertically. The results also show that societies can represent varying values across the different measures, underlying the necessity of working with analytical frameworks which approach the question of complexity in a non-linear manner. We believe that the method offered here can be a useful addition to the toolkit of mortuary archaeologists who work in areas and/or time periods with various body treatment practices.</span></p></div>","PeriodicalId":47957,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Archaeology","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101525"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49722283","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Understanding multi-sited early village communities of the American Southeast through categorical identities and relational connections","authors":"Neill J. Wallis , Thomas J. Pluckhahn","doi":"10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101527","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101527","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Early villages are often assumed to be economically and politically autonomous and equivalent to an archaeological socio-spatial unit that represents a maximum scale of cohesive residential communities. But the boundaries of some communities extended far beyond such sites of early population aggregation. In the coastal plain of the American Southeast, early village communities of the Middle and Late Woodland period (ca. 100 to 1000 CE) were located at civic-ceremonial centers that hosted periodic large-scale events, including feasting and mound building. These places regularly integrated mobile populations and permanent residents, arguably creating translocal communities that were both spatially expansive and densely integrated. We employ social network analysis as a way of identifying the spatial extent, composition, and structure of these translocal communities. We compare relational connections via a database of shared makers’ marks on Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery with categorical identities revealed in temporally constrained pottery type frequencies. We find that most early villages in this region were far from autonomous and instead were characterized by frequent relational connections and shared categorical identities spanning hundreds of kilometers, with civic-ceremonial centers serving as central nodes of interaction within and between spatially dispersed communities.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47957,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Archaeology","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101527"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49736637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Lech Czerniak , Joanna Święta-Musznicka , Anna Pędziszewska , Tomasz Goslar , Agnieszka Matuszewska
{"title":"Palynological studies shed new light on the Neolithisation process in central Europe","authors":"Lech Czerniak , Joanna Święta-Musznicka , Anna Pędziszewska , Tomasz Goslar , Agnieszka Matuszewska","doi":"10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101513","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101513","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>A precisely dated, high-resolution palynological profile shows that around 5680 BCE a community that grew crops and raised livestock settled on the northern periphery of the area later covered by the LBK colonisations. This indicates that pioneer farmers reached this region around 300 years earlier than estimated by recognised models of the Neolithisation process. These findings point to the need for a revision of the Neolithisation model, not only regarding dating but also in terms of reassessing the role played by demographic pressure. The authors believe that the impact of the latter is widely overestimated, because the migration could also be caused by conflicts resulting from ethnic diversity and competition for prestige and access to the most valuable lands. Cooperation with hunter-gatherer communities could have been an additional factor that may have been particularly significant during the period of pioneering colonisation. The paper discusses the role of palynology in contemporary research on Neolithisation.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47957,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Archaeology","volume":"70 ","pages":"Article 101513"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49720185","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}