Paleolithic (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only José-Miguel Tejero. Olivia Cheronet. Pere Gelabert. Gerhard Weber. Ron Pinhasi.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Resources in Experimental Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Osseous objects are among the most frequent archaeological remains recovered from Upper Paleolithic (UP) sites. Their analysis is thus essential to obtain insights into crucial aspects of the Pleistocene hunter-gatherer’s lifestyle, including human subsistence, social behavior, prehistoric humans’ practical/symbolic choices, and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Macdonald. Lisa Maher. Theresa Barket. Naomi Martisius. Ahmad Thaher.

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. The multicomponent Epipaleolithic site of Kharaneh IV, located in the Azraq Basin of eastern Jordan, documents over 1,000 years of occupation by hunter-gatherer groups during the end of the Last Glacial Maximum. Multiple lines of geomorphological, faunal, and archaeobotanical evidence indicate that the environs around the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carmen Martin-Ramos.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stone tool making has proven to be essential in human evolution and evolutionary cognitive archaeology studies (Herzlinger et al. 2017; Martín-Ramos 2022; Martín-Ramos and Steele 2023). In the case of the Acheulean technocomplex, concepts such as innovation, imposition of arbitrary form, and artifact variability have been linked to cognitive traits such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chantel White. Grant Bruner. Alessandra Dominguez. Jennifer Feng. Phoenix Strouse.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeogastronomy: Grocery Lists as Seen from a Multidimensional Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mughr el-Hamamah (MHM) cave site, located on the Jordan Valley’s eastern flanks, contains a prehistoric layer associated with Early Ahmarian artifacts. AMS 14C dates bracket the Early Upper Paleolithic (EUP) occupation between ca. 45 and 39 ka cal BP and are comparable in age to Ahmarian-associated layers...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosa Moll. Lyn Wadley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At Sibhudu Cave, the Still Bay technocomplex is found ~71,000 years ago and its formal tool component is dominated by bifacial points, while the deposit below, which Wadley (2012) called the pre-Still Bay, has a low density of bifacial points. The Pre-Still Bay has many flakes with few bifacial points, and it dates to between about 74,000 and 80,000 years...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Josie Mills.

Raw material studies are becoming increasingly popular as the development of technical and methodological advances adds to the macroscopic and geological study of stone tools. In turn this improves our capability to create a link between a stone tool’s archaeological context and geological area of origin. This connection is often discussed in terms of hominin behaviour, such as organisation of subsistence, adaptation to environment, and forward planning. However, the growing body of data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joao Cascalheira. Celia Goncalves. Nuno Bicho.

This is an abstract from the "Peninsular Southern Europe Refugia during the Middle Paleolithic" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Currently available data on the Pleistocene human occupation of the westernmost territories of Iberia attests the presence of Middle Paleolithic industries from c. 240 ka cal BP until c. 38 ka cal BP. Previous studies focusing on this timeframe have suggested that Middle Paleolithic populations were highly mobile and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Anne Melton.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Distinguishing cultural relatedness from independent convergence in lithic technological behavior requires high-resolution behavioral data. Arguably, the best source of such high-resolution data comes from refitted reduction sequences because these sequences illustrate the procedural steps taken by individuals to produce stone tools. But much remains to be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yuichi Nakazawa. Kyohei Sano.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Obsidian Studies of the Old and New Worlds" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among the various factors that potentially affect the obsidian hydration rates, intrinsic water content of obsidian has been considered a significant factor. Despite this understanding, variation in water content even within the geochemically identical provenance of obsidian makes us difficult to evaluate the effect of water content...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luc Doyon.

It has been argued that Aurignacian projectile points made of antler, bone, or ivory represent a proxy for the initial dispersal of Homo sapiens into Europe. Our research reassesses this claim by using geometric morphometric analysis to study 547 Aurignacian osseous implements recovered from 49 European sites. This approach allowed the identification of eight volumetric templates reproduced by Aurignacian artisans during the manufacture of split-based points. Two templates were identified for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aleksandra Savkovic. Katarina Bogicevic. Dragana Djuric.

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. Avian remains from the Paleolithic site of Crvena Stijena, located near the village Petrovići, Eastern Montenegro, have been studied. The inspected material comes from the samples collected in the field during the previous three years of research (2018, 2019, and 2021)....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miriam Belmaker. Omri Barzilai.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 'Ubeidiya, Central Jordan Valley, Israel, is one of the earliest prehistoric sites outside Africa. Extensive excavations in the second half of the twentieth century yielded important archaeological, paleontological, and geological data, which provided insights into early Pleistocene hominins’ expansion out of Africa. The primary geological descriptions of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Coppe. Veerle Rots. Marc Pirlot. Valérian Clarenne.

Projectile points have recently taken a prominent position in debates on the complexity of Paleolithic human behavior. While the appearance of hunting weapons in the archaeological record was a central element in early discussions, the debate has shifted towards the appearance of specific projecting modes. Given that the organic propulsion tools (bow, spear-thrower) are only rarely preserved, energy has been invested in experiments to explore how the projecting mode can be identified based on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Utting.

This is an abstract from the "The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. By studying stone tool technology, archaeologists and anthropologists shed light on big questions in human prehistory, including how ancient peoples adapted to changing environments, moved throughout landscapes, and interacted with other groups of people. There are many methodological approaches for characterizing stone tool technology,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Maher. Danielle Macdonald.

Searching for the origin points of major cultural revolutions and transitions has long been a driver of archaeological research, yet led to research focused on perceived boundaries, rather than continuity. Research into the origins of so-called modern human behavior, the origins of social complexity, the earliest domesticates, among others, all focus on defining moments of change that may be undetectable in the archaeological record. Perhaps some of the most enduring archaeological questions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samuel Neunzig.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Why was the bow and arrow so widely used to replace the atlatl? To address this question, I present a study on the creation and use of the longbow and arrow in its early use, as well as the transition from the atlatl with focus on the effectiveness of both tools in penetrating power and accuracy at varying ranges to determine which is the overall more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Radu Iovita.

One of the most important methodological issues facing modern paleoanthropology is the so far failed matching of archaeological material with specific hominins, at least at the metapopulation level. Due largely to the plethora of scenarios produced by genetic and genomic data in the last few years, the demand for archaeological confirmation or refutation of diverse dispersal scenarios has increased. Yet our understanding of lithic assemblages is not sufficiently nuanced to answer these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Osman Karrar. Jonathan Haws. Alvise Barbieri. Milena Carvalho. Nuno Bicho.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Nile valley, its associated drainage system, and the adjacent Sahara are thought to have been part of the Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH) dispersal routes out of Africa during the Middle and Late Pleistocene. Building on the pioneering prehistoric work of Marks and colleagues in the early 1960s in northern Sudan, we present the results of the 2019 and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ran Chen. Yue Wu.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The miniaturization of lithic artifacts indicates a significant shift in lithic technology and functions since the Upper Paleolithic, revealing a probable shift in subsistence strategy. Microblades are specific kinds of small stone tools that occur in sites dating back to the Upper Paleolithic through Neolithic in many parts of the world. Although it is widely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cindy Hsin-yee Huang.

This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The appearance of microliths and their rapid spread throughout Eurasia is one of the major developments in the evolution of Paleolithic technologies, since microliths and microblades, as part of complex modular tool packages, became the dominant technology in the Pleistocene (around 25,000 years ago) and persisted into the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Hallett. Jacopo Niccolo Cerasoni.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Resources in Experimental Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bone has been used as a raw material for a range of activities for at least two million years. The criteria for determining whether a bone was used—or shaped and then used—have been established by archaeologists following decades of experimental research. In contrast, the antiquity of using bone for pressure flaking stone is less well...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Merritt. Monica Avilez. Jonathan Reeves.

Fossil bone surface assemblages include differential specimen preservation (weathering stage, cortical surface exfoliation, polish, roundedness, fracture type) and identifiability (taxonomic or anatomical precision). Three 1x1 meter inventory squares placed on steep, moderate, and minimally sloping areas of a fossiliferous outcrop test whether outcrop shape is a megabias that influences assemblage attributes. A digital elevation model created from drone-captured aerial imagery describes outcrop...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Braun. Tyler Faith. Benjamin Davies. Mitchell Power. Matthew Douglass.

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. Although the past thirty years has witnessed tremendous advances in our understanding of the geographic and temporal scope of the Paleolithic record, we still know remarkably little about the evolutionary and ecological consequences of changes in human behavior. Are there events in human evolution that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Clark.

This is an abstract from the "More Than Shelter from the Storm: Hunter-Gatherer Houses and the Built Environment" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hunter-gatherers are mobile because their resources shift based on season or by ecological zone. This mobility means that their built environments are ephemeral and their mark on the land is light. Many of the traces of structures or land modifications are therefore invisible within the archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Maher. Danielle Macdonald.

This is an abstract from the "More Than Shelter from the Storm: Hunter-Gatherer Houses and the Built Environment" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A place is structured and given meaning through human experiences at both individual and group levels. Places are created through repeated human action and made tangible in the landscape by material culture. These places become part of a built environment, marked by daily routines or habitus. At the...