Showing papers in "Journal of Anthropological Archaeology in 2019"

TL;DR: In this paper, large-scale lidar captures reveal special-purpose facilities for defense, surveillance, possible chocolate plantations under close supervision, orderly if defensible landscapes, agricultural works of landesque scope, and overall regional articulations with variable intensity of settlement.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present new data for the importance of early domestic dogs to human groups in the region beyond this ‘core’ area where the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene environment is usually thought of as less favourable for human occupation.

TL;DR: This paper examined four dimensions of migration (scale, organization, and pre-migration conditions in homeland and destination) and the resultant coalescent trajectories in two intensively studied cases from the late pre-contact U.S. Southwest.

TL;DR: The authors examined published and unpublished Russian language material on this first millenium site, and evaluated the interpretations against three ethnoarchaeological models: herd-following, decoy-mediated hunting, and transport reindeer husbandry.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a Socio-Ecological Systems (SES) framework to integrate models of human and natural landscape formation processes in the mid to late Holocene on the Talgar alluvial fan on the north slope of the Tian Shan Mountains in the area known as “Semirech’ye” (“Seven Rivers”).

TL;DR: In this paper, a micromorphological thin-section and integrated phytolith and faecal spherulite analyses were performed to examine livestock penning deposits across the settlement.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors evaluate the role of intermediate elites who occupied the middle level of the settlement hierarchy of the Belize River Valley of west-central Belize and find evidence for five political strategies which intermediate elites used to gain and maintain power and authority.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the potential of high-resolution, multispectral satellite imagery for building a predictive model of the settlement pattern of the Iron Age polity of Bosutswe (700-1650 CE) in Botswana.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors compared the Clovis-to-Folsom transition with the Folsom lithic network, and found that the latter is significantly denser than the former in terms of the number of recognized point types, site frequency, and increased geographic patterning in stone tool variation.

TL;DR: In this article, Radiogenic strontium and mass-dependent oxygen and carbon isotope analysis on a large sample of herd animals (sheep, goats, and cattle) from Late Bronze Age (1500-1100 BC) sites in the Tsaghkahovit Plain, Armenia indicate that long-distance movements across geological zones were not common, but that animals were drinking from a range of water sources.

TL;DR: In this paper, a critical period in Europe at about 400-ka (MIS 11) when we may be able to identify such groups is reviewed, see more sustained occupation and evidence of new technologies, including bone and wooden tools, hunting and fire-use.

TL;DR: In this article, a review of bioarchaeological work on sex, gender, and health in relation to issues of health and disease is presented, focusing on metabolic disease, trauma and violence, infectious disease, and overall health (e.g., frailty).

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine how three southern Northwest Coast households organized and orchestrated a complex labor task: building and maintaining their houses, by developing estimates of labor and raw material costs, and then use this analysis to show how house building and maintenance bears on issues of collective action, monumentality, anthropogenic landscapes, the development of concepts of property on the Northwest Coast, and of household continuity across episodes of cultural change.

TL;DR: The authors applied the Ideal Free Distribution (IFD) to a settlement record spanning over 3000 years (ca. 6100-3000 BCE) in 14 sub-regions of Eastern Europe to establish a quantitative indicator of changing subsistence strategies throughout the fourth millennium BCE.

TL;DR: This article examined inequality among households from Orayvi ca. 1901 to contextualize the patterns of inequality reported among ancestral Pueblo households in the basketmaker II-Pueblo III periods from the central Mesa Verde region, middle San Juan region, Chaco Canyon, and the Chuska Valley.

TL;DR: In this article, a model of community formation and organizational complexity is presented, focusing on the fundamental role of social interactions and information transmission for the development of complex social organisation in the absence of direct observations of constituent social interactions.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present selected ethnographical data to shed light on regional data that are key to understanding the process of exploration, including information on the human dispersal into new lands and on the management of knowledge.

TL;DR: In this article, an archaeological example from the Chalbi Desert is presented as evidence of longue-duree persistence of human occupations through extreme climatic fluctuations, indicating the presence of robust regional exchange networks and either continuous or repeated occupation of this hot, dry, mosaic woodland.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors provide both local and regional spatial perspectives for a mortuary population by combining surface collection and excavation to describe activity areas and population size at a Bronze Age cemetery in Eastern Hungary.

TL;DR: In this paper, the relationship between obsidian blades and bloodletting in Maya ritual contexts from the perspective of ritual economy is explored, highlighting the use of blades in Actun Uayazba Kab (Handprint Cave) in Western Belize.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present comparative analyses of hunter-gatherer ethnographic records that show the importance of provisioning in supporting dogs engaged in energetically demanding activities in early human-canid working relationships.

TL;DR: This paper performed carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analysis on the hair of 304 humans and 57 dogs from 45 households in two contemporary indigenous communities in Nicaragua's Bosawas Biosphere Reserve to explore whether dogs function as dietary proxies for their human owners in this Neotropical horticulturalist context.

TL;DR: In this paper, surface treatments are used as a means to understand the skills of potters and the social values of specific ceramic products in Copper Age communities from central Italy and reveal differences in the chaine operatoire and skills involved in the production of domestic and funerary vessels.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present evidence for occupational shifts from the initial habitation of this long coastal basin by peoples with an extant agricultural village economy to the rise of a linear string of important and seemingly autonomous coastal centers to the breakdown of this network and the region's eventual incorporation as an ultimate provincial piece into the Qin Empire.

TL;DR: Light is shed on biocultural factors contributing to vitamin D deficiency in the Roman period assemblage from Isola Sacra, Italy (1st–3rd century AD) comprising 678 individuals (307 nonadults, 371 adults).

TL;DR: Pucarani as discussed by the authors is the single largest hillfort documented to date in Arkush's multi-year investigations of 49 such sites in the northwestern Titicaca Basin and its defensive walls are the largest by far.

TL;DR: In this article, the Parana River wetland includes a high number of Late Holocene archaeological sites from hunter-gatherer groups which share material properties related to a common subsistence strategy, material variability can be seen in the regional scale.

TL;DR: This article applied information-theoretic measures to a corpus of 6859 distinct coin types from the Ancient Mediterranean world, dated between c. 625 and c. 31 BCE, and found that the symbols minted on coins became increasingly informative about a coin's value.