Paleolithic (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Mentzer. Bertrand Ligouis. Christoph Berthold. Christopher Miller. Sarah Wurz.

This is an abstract from the "Charred Organic Matter in the Archaeological Sedimentary Record" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Several South African Middle Stone Age (MSA) sites contain deposits rich in anthropogenic materials whose preservation was impacted by extreme burial environments. The specific chemistries of the burial environments are evidenced by dissolution of archaeological materials and/or precipitation of secondary minerals. In sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolina Mallol. Margarita Jambrina-Enríquez. Gilliane Monnier. Gilbert Tostevin. Goran Pajovic.

This is an abstract from the "The Late Middle Paleolithic in the Western Balkans: Results from Recent Excavations at Crvena Stijena, Montenegro" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A trend in the past few decades of archaeological research is to apply different microstratigraphic techniques, which provide clues about behavioral and paleoenvironmental aspects of past societies. At Crvena Stijena (Montenegro), a Middle Paleolithic site under current...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Benitez. John Murray.

This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the most significant, yet understudied, subjects in paleoanthropology is the emergence of culture and its resulting transition from biological evolution to human-specific biocultural evolution. Scholarship on this topic has historically been lacking partly due to an absence of a coherent framework...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ross Pain. Anton Killin.

This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cognitive archaeology faces the problem of minimum necessary competence: as the most sophisticated thinking of ancient hominins may have been in domains that leave no archaeological signature, it is safest to assume that tool production and use reflects only the lower boundary of cognitive capacities. Cognitive archaeology involves selecting a model from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cyler Conrad. Caitlin Ainsworth. Emily Lena Jones.

Rabbits and hares are often a central part of human subsistence strategies in both the past and the present. However, the Burmese hare (Lepus peguensis) – the sole member of the family Leporidae indigenous to mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) – is rarely eaten today, and its status in the past is unclear. Although this taxon is currently abundant across a wide geographic range, it has a poor zooarchaeological record during the Pleistocene and Holocene. Identified specimens occur sporadically in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Kelley. Guangmau Xie. Qiang Lin. Miriam Belmaker.

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the main questions in human evolution concerns the dispersal of modern humans into Eurasia. Given the current tropical environment of South China, we may wonder whether early modern humans entering this region could penetrate the rainforest to forage for food, and indeed whether the environment in this area was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ewa Dutkiewicz. Sibylle Wolf. Nicholas J. Conard.

This is an abstract from the "Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The human body plays a significant role in constructing identity. According to Bourdieu (1974, 1976), the habitus, displays the social status and the role of the individual within a society. Group membership manifests itself with symbols like personal ornaments, the choice of emblematic objects, and their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Wright. Jeong-Heon Choi. Jessica Thompson.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances and Debates in the Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Advances in understanding the Pleistocene archaeology of Africa depend on well-dated models of human behavioral change. Portions of southern Africa with limestone caves and eastern Africa with volcanic tephra have datable materials (uranium and argon, respectively) beyond the limit of the radiocarbon clock (50ka)....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Reuven Yeshurun.

In zooarchaeology, Contextual Taphonomy means the integration of the stratigraphic and contextual data with zooarchaeological and taphonomic data, to clarify the 'life history' of a faunal sub-assemblage in a given context. The approach uses animal remains to explain variability among site features by looking into the differential taphonomic histories of the bones, most importantly in the post-discard stage. Archaeofaunal remains are normally ubiquitous in foragers’ camps and their histories are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elena Rossoni-Notter. Olivier Notter. Abdelkader Moussous.

This is an abstract from the "Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology of Liguria: Recent Research and Insights" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Methodological research had been conducted from the late nineteenth century thanks to Albert I, Prince of Monaco. He is acknowledged across the world for his key role in Paleolithic issues and the history of science. Excavations and leading publications under his leadership bring the fruit of early experience and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alison Brooks. Joshua Porter. John Yellen.

This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Harold Dibble made major contributions to the study of cores and their relation to flake morphology. Other experimental studies have shown that repeated core morphologies may be the result of a complex series of learned steps, which are culturally transmitted (e.g., K. L. Ranhorn, PhD...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eugene Morin. John D. Speth. Julia Lee-Thorp.

This paper examines dietary patterns amongst Middle Palaeolithic foragers in Europe and southwest Asia from ca 300 to 40 thousand years ago. In both regions, faunal studies show that a relatively narrow range of presumably high-ranked animal species—mostly medium- to large-sized ungulates—was hunted. The present review stresses the importance of considering fat procurement and the effects of transport constraints on faunal assemblages while assessing the diet composition of Middle Palaeolithic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nuno Bicho. João Cascalheira.

One of the main elements in prehistoric research is the study of settlement patterns. In the last five decades, stemming partially from Binford’s research on the topic, the idea of settlement is based on site typology, including the traditional residential and logistic concepts. The latter is certainly marked by the notion of short-term occupation. This concept, used freely by many archaeologists, tends to rely on two main ideas— that of an occupation lasting a short span of time, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eugene Smith. Racheal Johnsen. Jayde Hirniak. Minghua Ren. Curtis Marean.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances and Debates in the Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Placing archaeological sites on the same timeline across the African continent is essential for determining the initial appearance of key human behaviors and cultural features. Analytical error associated with traditional dating techniques makes these determinations difficult. Cryptotephra, which are small (<80 micron)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elham Ghasidian. Saman Heydari-Guran.

Located in western Eurasia, at the crossroads of human migrations out of Africa during the Pleistocene, the Iranian Plateau stands at the centre of models of anatomically modern human dispersals out of Africa. This paper aims to understand the cultural diversity among the first modern human populations in the area, and the implications of this diversity to evolutionary and ecological models of human dispersal through the Iranian Plateau, by re-examining four key UP lithic assemblages from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Merritt.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Animal carcass butchery occurs when technological factors (tool attributes) and butchery behavior (distinct actions like defleshing, disarticulation) intersect with animal anatomy (morphology of musculoskeletal tissues or regions), and potentially encodes information about these contexts via bone surface modifications. This study examines cut mark...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Viola Schmid. Irini Sifogeorgaki. Gerrit Dusseldorp. Wei Chu.

This is an abstract from the "Debitage Analysis: Case Studies, Successes, and Cautionary Tales" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Raw materials are the lowest common denominator of any debitage analysis. And yet, the fracture mechanics of eccentric raw materials are not always fully considered when performing inter-/intra-assemblage comparisons. The fracture mechanics as one constraint to be respected by the knappers greatly influence archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arturo De Lombera-Hermida. Geoffrey Clark. Xosé Pedro Rodríguez-Álvarez. Ramón Fábregas-Valcarce.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Northwest Iberia is a Paleozoic territory almost void of flint outcrops. The arrival of Cantabrian Upper Paleolithic groups, used to flintknapping, to a new lithological region implied a reorganization of their technological basis. The analysis of four lithic assemblages, ranging from the Aurignacian to the Final Magdalenian/Azilian, allows us to understand...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Thacker.

This is an abstract from the "Debitage Analysis: Case Studies, Successes, and Cautionary Tales" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lithic debitage attributes are critical for interpreting the open-air Upper Paleolithic archaeological site of Olival Grande in central Portugal. Fabric analysis, intrasite spatial patterning, and weathered surface features of artifacts indicate manifold site burial mechanisms and significant postdepositional processes at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cheng Liu. Nada Khreisheh. Dietrich Stout. Justin Pargeter.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite the extensive literature focusing on Acheulean bifaces, especially the sources and meaning of their morphological variability, many aspects of this topic remain elusive. Archaeologists cite many factors that contribute to the considerable variation of biface morphology, including knapper skill levels and mental templates. Here we present results...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Zerboni. Guido S. Mariani. Sahra Talamo. Fabio Negrino. Julien Riel-Salvatore.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in the Prehistory of Liguria and Neighboring Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The reconstruction of Pleistocene human peopling along the Tyrrhenian coastline of Liguria is of critical importance. This region has yielded among the most recent evidence of Neanderthal occupation and the most ancient traces of modern humans in southern Europe. The reconstruction of the subsistence strategies of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joana Belmiro. Jovan Galfi. Nuno Bicho. Xavier Terradas. João Cascalheira.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on the Paleolithic in the Mediterranean Region" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hunter-gatherers relied strongly on lithic raw materials, which make them a key aspect to understand mobility, land use, and other important cultural aspects. Identifying changes in raw material provisioning through time is key to understand how different groups adapted and reorganized their culture. This is especially true...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eugene Morin. Jacqueline Meier. Khalid El Guennouni. Anne-Marie Moigne. Loic Lebreton.

This is an abstract from the "Do Good Things Come in Small Packages? Human Behavioral Ecology and Small Game Exploitation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Europe, medium- to large-sized herbivores are widely considered to have formed the bulk of the human diet during the Lower and Middle Paleolithic. In contrast, small fast prey taxa were allegedly rarely exploited. Here, we report new data for a number of leporid assemblages from Southern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Mentzer. Ivo Verheijen. Britt Starkovich. Jordi Serangeli. Nicholas Conard.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Science and African Archaeology: Appreciating the Impact of David Killick" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When conducting micro-X-ray fluorescence (µXRF) analyses of archaeological and geological materials, diffraction peaks, which are produced by crystalline materials, are typically unwanted and methods are devised to minimize their impact on the sample spectrum. Here, we explore the intentional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Thacker.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The expansive, open-air archaeological site of Olival Grande contains the earliest, well-dated Upper Paleolithic assemblage known from the Rio Maior vicinity. Fabric analysis, sedimentology, and geochemistry studies detail manifold site burial mechanisms, very slow rates of deposition, and significant post-depositional processes at the hillslope site. This...