Thursday, April 9, 2009

Other papers not to be missed at the 2009 SAAs

There are a variety of other presentations that I think should be on the lists of "must sees" at this year's SAA meetings.

Long time friend and colleague, Tim Hunt is making his return to archaeological research with his long-in-the-wings study of surface characterization of lithics. Tim is presenting his poster "Fracture Surface Characterization of Heat-Treated Cherts" on Friday Morning. The poster should be presenting data Tim collected using a new profilometer and will include fractal analysis of surface structure. I'm fairly certain this is going to make the crappy junk science that people have done with heat treatment look (as it should) like 8th century AD alchemy (if it bleeds, it's a witch!).

I think the symposium (Thursday afternoon) being put on by Nathan Goodale (now TT at Hamilton College) and Bill Andrefsky (WSU) on "EVOLUTIONARY APPROACHES TO UNDERSTANDING STONE TECHNOLOGIES AS A BYPRODUCT OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR" will be a good one. While I wish this was a poster session and not a series of papers (so 1972), the titles of the papers look interesting and useful. With posters and other things going on, who can really sit for an entire afternoon to listen to all the papers?

1:00 Nathan Stevens—How Should Evolutionary Theory be Incorporated into Lithic Analysis?

1:15 Lee Lyman—Graphing Evolutionary Pattern in Stone Tools to Reveal Evolutionary Process (hmmm. sounds familiar)

1:30 Colin Quinn—Signals in Stone: Exploring the Role of Social Information Exchange, Conspicuous Consumption, and Costly Signaling Theory in Lithic

Analysis

1:45 Robert Bettinger, Christopher Morgan and Loukas Barton—The North China Nanolithic

2:00 Loukas Barton, Christopher Morgan, Robert Bettinger and Dongju Zhang—The Economics of Stasis: Pleistocene-Holocene Quartz Industries on China’s

Western Loess Plateau

2:15 Charlotte Beck and George T. Jones—A Case of Extinction in Intermountain Paleoindian Lithic Technology

2:30 Jennifer Ferris—Central Place Foraging Theory and Toolstone Procurement Costs: Determining Source Distance from Lithic Debitage Reduction Techniques on EspĂ­ritu Santo Island, Baja California Sur

2:45 Carl Lipo, Brooke Hundtoft and Terry Hunt—Analyses of Stylistic Variability among Stemmed Obsidian Artifacts on Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

3:00 Marcus Hamilton and Briggs Buchanan—Viewing cultural transmission as a diffusion process: Models, tests and implications

3:15 Nathan Goodale, William Andrefsky, Lara Cueni, Curtis Osterhoudt and Ian

Kuijt—Cultural Transmission and the Production of Material Goods: A Neolithic Case Study of the Neutral Model and Identity in Notched Points

3:30 Lisa Fontes, Nathan Goodale, Anna Prentiss and Curtis Osterhoudt—Tracing a Migration: A Study of Athapaskan Side Notched Points and Evolutionary Patterns

3:45 Anna Prentiss, Curtis Osterhoudt, Nathan Goodale and Nicole Crossland—

Cultural Transmission and the Organization of the Lithic Technology: The Slate Tool Industry from the Bridge River Site, British Columbia

4:00 Todd Van Pool, Michael O'Brien and R. Lee Lyman—Innovation and Natural Selection in Paleoindian Projectile Points

4:15 Michael Shott—Morphometric Approaches to the Study of Fluted Points

4:30 Ken Ames—Discussant

4:45 Jim Boone—Discussant

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