Paleolithic (Other Keyword)

76-100 (409 Records)

Discovery of a New Middle Magdalenian Site at Enval in the Massif Central of France (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Jay Franklin. Frédéric Surmely. Sandrine Costamagno. Maureen Hays. Lauren Woelkers.

We present the discovery of a new Middle Magdalenian site at Enval, a rock shelter site in the Massif Central of France. Radiocarbon dates indicate a tight chronology at 17,000 years ago. The site is significant for several reasons. Faunal elements indicate the site is largely intact and not a palimpsest. Faunal studies also indicate the site was occupied during the winter. This is important because it demonstrates that late Pleistocene humans occupied the Massif Central during harsh conditions....


Distinguishing Tooth Marks from Knapping Marks and Assessing Conflicting Interpretations of Modified Bones from the Upper Paleolithic Site of Gough’s Cave (Somerset, UK) (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Silvia Bello. Simon Parfitt.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Resources in Experimental Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Experimental and fossil-based zooarchaeological research attempts to distinguish traces on bones associated with human actions (e.g., butchery marks) from the actions of other faunal agents (e.g., bone gnawing and trampling). Fewer analyses have tried to differentiate gnawing marks from the marks left by hominin activities associated with the...


Does the Emergence of Paleolithic Body Ornamentation Signal an Unprecedented Aptitude for Symbolling Behavior or just a New Application? (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Stiner.

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. Given the collective evidence for the Paleolithic in Eurasia, it is peculiar that the emergence of durable art in archaeological records is taken to reflect a parallel emergence for the capacity of hominins to engage in symboling behavior of any sort. The ample record of burial practices of during the Middle...


Dynamic Simulation of Large Herbivore Distribution during the Last Glacial Maximum: Implications for the Distribution of Human Populations (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Samuel Seuru. Liliana Perez. Ariane Burke.

This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology II (QUANTARCH II)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this study we propose the use of agent-based modelling (ABM) and cellular automata (CA) to test the impact of predator-prey relationships on the distribution of prehistoric human populations. Our research goal is to establish a dynamic model of the distribution of large herbivores that constituted the main food source for...


The Earlier Stone Age Occupation of Wonderwerk Cave: Combining the Archaeology and Geology (2015)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Chazan.

The archaeology and geology of the Earlier Stone Age of Wondewerk Cave (Northern Cape Province, South Africa) present a paradoxical picture. On the one hand there is a record of hominin occupation spanning a period of at least one million year that includes multiple proxies indicating the use of fire. However, the micromorphological study of the sediment shows almost no anthropogenic signal and the density of artifacts is extraordinarily low. This paper presents an overview of the current...


The Earliest Architectural Remains in Anatolia (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Alper Basiran. Cevdet Merih Erek.

The occupation of man has played an important role on cultural innovation; at the same time this process has always been a requirement of daily life for generation continuity. Since the start of human life history, choosing of places for occupation species has had different features. For example, the cave or rock shelters were preferred by Paleolithic man and they have hot style caves and/or shelters due to the period; this developed in Pleistocene climatologic conditions that were cold because...


Early Aurignacian Symbolic Technologies: Assessing the Relationship between Personal Ornaments and Coloring Materials in SW France (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Joelle Nivens.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Castel-Merle Valley (Dordogne, France) bears three of the most important Aurignacian (40-28 ka) sites: the Abris Blanchard, Castanet, and de la Souquette. Together, these sites offer strong evidence for the shifting social dynamics reflected in the period’s characteristic innovations. The best explored of this evidence are their atypically large and...


Early Middle Paleolithic Blade Lithic Technology from the Site of Via San Francesco (Liguria, Northwestern Italy): Geoarchaeology, Chronology, and Cultural Features (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Fabio Negrino. Tobias Lauer. Andrea Zerboni. Sahra Talamo. Guido Mariani.

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. During MIS 5, in northwestern Europe, there are lithic assemblages characterized by the application of laminar methods performed on volumetric cores through a careful maintenance of lateral and distal convexities. In southern Europe, although blades are reported in several Mousterian contexts, nothing comparable to...


Early Middle Pleistocene Flake Production Methods at Nadung'a Site Complex, West Turkana, Kenya (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Jenna Anderson. Sonia Harmand.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Middle Pleistocene (0.77-0.13 Ma) was a crucial time in the evolution of the human brain. Homo heidelbergensis cranial fossils and endocasts provide evidence of brain size increases and structural changes during this time, which resulted in brains more like our own. The analysis of Acheulean lithic assemblages provides a means of exploring how these...


Early Pleistocene Behavior and Archaeological Inference: Insights from Experiments (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only David Braun.

This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeology of human origins represents one of the key insights into what it means to be human. Despite this optimistic outlook, the archaeological record represents a dismally preserved record of untranslated objects. Archaeologists have become increasingly good at devising stories about the records of behaviors that our artifacts represent. However,...


Early Pleistocene Hominin Expansion and Landscape Evolution in the Armenian Highlands (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Jenni Sherriff. Boris Gasparyan. Katie Preece. Mark Sier. Keith Wilkinson.

This is an abstract from the "Pleistocene Landscapes and Hominin Behavior in the Armenian Highlands" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding the chronology and environmental context of the earliest hominin expansions into Eurasia is of considerable interest in paleoanthropology. Several Early Pleistocene archaeological sites in the Armenian Highlands and wider Caucasus region have demonstrated the importance of the region for understanding...


Early Steps into the Paleolithic Research of the Armenian Highlands (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Yannick Raczynski-Henk.

This is an abstract from the "Pleistocene Landscapes and Hominin Behavior in the Armenian Highlands" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This session about the current state of affairs into the research of the Paleolithic of the Armenian Highlands (Armenia and Georgia) will be opened with an overview of the research history of the area, providing a framework for the following presentations. The focus of this presentation is on the historical...


The Early–Middle Pleistocene Settlement of Northern Armenia (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Adler. Keith Wilkinson. Jennifer Sherriff. Mark Sier. Boris Gasparyan.

This is an abstract from the "Pleistocene Landscapes and Hominin Behavior in the Armenian Highlands" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Northern Armenia and southern Georgia, divided in the Haghtanak-Bagratashen area by the Debed River, witnessed considerable volcanic activity between ~2.1 and 1.6 Ma, toward the end of which the earliest evidence of Homo outside Africa is found at Dmanisi. The rich assemblages of lithic, faunal, and human fossil...


The EAST Typology: A Remedy for Eastern Africa’s "Lithics Systematics Anarchy" (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only John Shea.

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. Eastern Africa boasts the world’s longest archaeological record, more than 3,4 million years so far. And yet, that record defies easy synthesis due to "lithics systematic anarchy." Archaeologists working in Eastern Africa describe and measure stone tools in so many different ways, that detailed comparisons within...


Economies of Symbolism: Procurement and Production with ‘Precious’ Materials in the French Upper Paleolithic (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Ranlett.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the Lower Paleolithic, the collections and/or minimal modification of rare or unusual materials – ‘precious’ materials – such as amber, lignite, soapstone, has been a part of the human behavioral suite (Moncel et al. 2012). During the Upper Paleolithic, this behavior intensified as these materials were routinely incorporated into symbolic systems through...


Emic Knapping Perspectives and the Analytical Concept of Raw Material Similarity: Building a Contextualized Theory of Lithic Raw Material Selection (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Thacker.

Existing frameworks for analyzing lithic raw material economies insufficiently characterize the complex interface of reduction strategies with local raw material variability. This presentation contextualizes assemblage technological organization from the Middle and Upper Paleolithic of Portugal with occurrence frequencies and size variability in local raw material cobbles. The new analytical concept of similarity differentiates Middle Paleolithic quartz preference within a pattern of overall raw...


An Emotional Challenge: What Can We Infer about Capacities for Social Emotions in Archaic Humans? (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Penny Spikins. Gail Hitchens.

Social emotions are central to human social lives, however whilst there has been much discussion about archaic human cognition in terms of analytical capacities, capacities in terms of social emotions are rarely discussed. A 'null hypothesis' of a lack of pro-social motivations is often assumed to be the most rational scientific perspective on how archaic humans felt towards each other. Over recent years accumulating evidence for complex social relationships in archaic humans argues against this...


Employing Bayesian Probability Theory to Diverse Applications Relevant to Archaeology (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Harris. Curtis Marean. Kiona Ogle. Jessica Thompson.

The principle of equifinality describes a system where an end state may be reached from a variety of conditions and in a variety of ways and has proved to be a confounding element in several areas in archaeology. Archaeological data commonly occur in both qualitative and quantitative form and Bayesian modeling, coupled with modern computational routines, permits multiple data types to be incorporated into a single synthetic probability model. The Bayesian approach makes probability statements...


Ephemera: Bone Tools as Windows into the “Archaeologically Invisible” (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Desmond.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Resources in Experimental Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How does our knowledge of what people made influence our understanding of who people were? In most prehistoric contexts, stone tools serve as default technological benchmarks. This emphasis on stone tools, in turn, foregrounds practices related to hunting and animal processing. Organic technologies more closely linked with child-wearing,...


Epifluorescence Microscopy of Experimentally Heated Animal Bones: Applications to Archaeological Micromorphology (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Glenn Lambrecht. Inocencio Rafael Martín Benenzuela. Caterina R. de Vera. Carolina Mallol.

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. Burned bones are an important constituent of the archaeological sedimentary record. Their presence is usually indicative of human activity and may provide information about past human behavior. In micromorphological thin sections, charred bone fragments may appear as opaque and amorphous, and extremely difficult to...


ESR Dating Herbivore Teeth within the Mousterian Layers at Šalitrena Pećina, Serbia (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Gligor Dakovic. Bonnie A.B. Blackwell. Bojana Mihailovic. Senka Plavsic. Justin K. Qi.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Overlooking the Ribnica River near Breždje in the Dinaric Mountains, central Serbia, Šalitrena Pećina records a continuous Late Pleistocene sedimentary sequence records over the Middle/Upper Paleolithic (MP/UP) transition. In the cave entrance, six sediment layers reach ~ 1.5 m thick. Layer 2's Neolithic artefacts overlie Layers 3-4's Gravettian artefacts. ...


Establishing Baselines for Stone Tool Variation Across the Early Pleistocene: A Least Effort Approach (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Reeves. Levi Raskin. Matthew Douglass. David Braun.

This is an abstract from the "Variability: A Reassessment of Its Meaning, Afforded Range, and the Relation to Process" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our understanding of the evolution of human behavior is largely predicated on how stone tools vary through time and across space. Despite a long history of research, the behavioral processes associated with Early Pleistocene lithic technology remain debated. Some research suggests that lithic...


Evaluating lithic microwear traces in terms of settlement mobility patterns and raw mateiral distributions (2015)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaoru Akoshima.

The paper investigates concrete methods to evaluate lithic microwear data in conjunction with human mobility patterns and raw material distributions. Since the discovery of micro-polish variety reflecting different worked materials, use-wear analysts emphasized reconstruction of individual behavioral episodes at the site location. However, actual wear traces reveal highly complex patterns, partially attributable to combined factors of mobility and raw material selection. Conventional methods of...


Evaluating the Effects of Human Disturbance on Middle Stone Age Surface Finds from Northern Malawi (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Sheila Nightingale. Jessica C. Thompson. Jacob Davis. Flora Schilt. Jeong-Heon Choi.

Abundant surface scatters of Middle Stone Age artifacts are found throughout northern Malawi, eroding from remnant alluvial fan deposits (Chitimwe Beds). Surface surveys documenting these areas have guided the emplacement of 50+ archaeological test pits and excavations, many of which have yielded in situ MSA sites. However, the surficial evidence itself has been subject to less discussion and merits closer attention. At the Bruce site, surface artifacts were identified as part of an assemblage...


Evaluating the Impact of Climatic and Environmental Conditions on AMH Initial Dispersal into Western Europe (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Simon Paquin. Ariane Burke.

Paleoenvironmental reconstruction is an important tool for evaluating and understanding interactions between human populations and their environment during Prehistory. The downscaled global paleoclimatic models produced by the multidisciplinary efforts of the Hominins Dispersal Research Group allow for a fine-scale examination of climatic conditions in Paleolithic Europe. These models enable a spatial accuracy of 15 x 15 km and the consideration of inter-annual variability for different climatic...