Paleolithic (Other Keyword)
101-125 (499 Records)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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 Plant Food Use and Processing: Insights from Madjedbebe Rockshelter, Northern Australia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A broad spectrum diet, including the exploitation of a variety of wild plant foods, has historically been considered a pre-cursor to the origins of agriculture. However, increasing evidence globally points to the use of a range of plant foods, including seeds and underground storage organs, by...
Early Pleistocene Behavior and Archaeological Inference: Insights from Experiments (2021)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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...
The effects of carnivore diversity on scavenging opportunities and hominin range expansion during Out of Africa I (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Numerous extrinsic hypotheses explaining Out of Africa I, like faunal turnover and hominins following fauna, have been rejected based on paleoecological models. Others have explored the importance of the hominin intrusion into the carnivore guild. Here, I build on this hypothesis by proposing a complementary hypothesis; the scavenging corridor hypothesis...
Emic Knapping Perspectives and the Analytical Concept of Raw Material Similarity: Building a Contextualized Theory of Lithic Raw Material Selection (2018)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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...
Evolving Social Networks during the Late Pleistocene: An Interior Perspective from Grassridge Rockshelter, South Africa (2021)
This is an abstract from the "From Veld to Coast: Diverse Landscape Use by Hunter-Gatherers in Southern Africa from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans are social beings and being able to track social interactions and relationships across space and through time is a major focus of both anthropological and archaeological research. Within archaeology, the scale and intensity of social interactions has been...
Examining Sedimentation Rates, Find Densities, Raw Material Economies and Technological Solutions in Paleolithic Contexts (2017)
This paper examines low density Paleolithic sites from several geological contexts within a diachronic framework. The case studies consider what unifying elements and differences exist in Lower, Middle and Upper Paleolithic contexts and addresses their causes with regard to the nature of sedimentation, raw material availability and technological needs. Where preservation permits links will be made between assemblages of lithic, faunal and botanical artifacts at the contexts studied to help...