Paleolithic (Other Keyword)
251-275 (499 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Environmental perturbations are invoked as an influence of hominin speciation, dispersal and technological innovations. Archaeological occurrences preserving the transition from the Middle Stone Age to the Later Stone Age are critical to gauging environmental influences of human adaptations, yet there is a dearth of well-dated sites in eastern Africa. The...
The Many Meanings of Red: Ochre Use through Time in Southern Africa (2019)
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. From c.100 000 years ago, ochre pieces were habitually collected and used at Middle Stone Age sites in southern Africa. This earthy iron-rich rock has been continually used since then and still has many applications today, such as pigment, sunscreen or body paint for ritual purposes. Although a range of colors were...
Marxism in Chinese Archaeology (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 founding of the People's Republic of China, Marxism became a kind of official philosophical thinking embeded in all the humanities. Thus, in most Western archaeologists’ minds, Chinese archaeology is a kind of Marxist archaeology, as Bruce Trigger described. We admit to this kind of definition, but the status of contemporary archaeology is already...
The Meaning of a Sample of Teeth Pendants from the Paleolithic Bacho Kiro Cave in Bulgaria (Exc. 1971–1975) (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. Bone artifacts from the past are indicators of increased diversity in human behavior and culture. Determining the bone tool type can provide information about past technology, cultural provenience, symbolic expressions, and the type of exploited fauna that inhabited different geographical regions....
Measuring Intensity: Harold Dibble’s Contributions to Paleoanthropology and Specifically to the Measure of Site Occupational Intensity (2023)
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’s contributions to Paleolithic archaeology are numerous. Of the two contributions that I feel had the largest impact, the first is the intensity of energy Dibble brought to every endeavor, particularly to broadening the application of rigorous empiricism to the...
Measuring Movement: The Influence of Scraper Reduction Models on the Early Pleistocene (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The identification of the “Frison Effect” on Middle Paleolithic scraper variability has had numerous subsequent implications. The initial influence revolved around our understanding of the then-prevailing use of typological distinctions in the Middle Paleolithic. However, the quantitative...
Measuring Reduction Intensity in Laminar Cores: An Experimental Approach and Archaeological Application (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Reduction intensity analysis plays a key role in understanding the formation of lithic assemblages and the occupation patterns of Paleolithic sites. Furthermore, technological variability and core classifications can be better understood if the diachronic component of the reduction is taken into consideration. The Volumetric Reconstruction Method (VRM),...
Measuring the complexity of lithic technology (2015)
Assessments of the complexity of lithic technologies coming from different time periods, regions, or hominid species are recurrent features of the literature on Paleolithic archaeology. Yet the notion of lithic complexity is often defined intuitively and qualitatively, which can easily lead to circular arguments and makes difficult the comparison of assemblages across different regions and time periods. Here we propose, in the spirit of Oswalt’s techno-units, that the complexity of lithic...
Micromorphological Investigations of Site Formation History between Layers XVII and XVIII at Middle Paleolithic Rockshelter Crvena Stijena, Montenegro (2023)
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. Rockshelters are subject to many geological processes driven by natural and human agents alike. The sedimentary context that surrounds artifactual data is a vital resource to the scientific exploration of human behavior in the Middle Paleolithic. To connect assemblages and...
Middle Paleolithic Land Use and Behavior in the Armenian Highlands: A Preliminary Synthesis (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. Over the last two decades, international-Armenian projects have greatly expanded and refined the Middle Paleolithic (MP) record in the Armenian Highlands. Here, we preliminarily synthesize current chronometric, lithic, and faunal evidence. Our goal is to develop some hypotheses on hominin land use, subsistence, and...
Middle Paleolithic Land Use in the Northern Adriatic: Preliminary Data from the Open-Air Site of Campanož (Croatia) (2023)
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. The site of Campanož, located in the south of the Istrian peninsula, is a relatively new discovery of the Middle Paleolithic record of Croatia. Because it is a stratified open-air site, its discovery has opened questions regarding Middle Paleolithic land use in a region that has until now been heavily biased toward cave...
Middle Pleistocene Lifeways in the Azraq Oasis, Jordan (2017)
This introductory paper to the session on research underway at the Shishan Marsh I site in the Azraq Oasis, Jordan presents an overview of the results of our paleoenvironmental, faunal, lithic and site formation analyses. A model of targeted and repeated use of the marsh is suggested. These results are situated within their historic and regional contexts and their implications for understanding the capabilities of Middle Pleistocene hominins are also considered.
The Middle Stone Age at Gona, Afar, Ethiopia: Implications for Regionalization and Migrations (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. Tentatively dated to MIS 5/4, the YAS-1 (Ya’alu South 1) site at Gona, Ethiopia is a high-density open-air archaeological site preserving classic Middle Stone Age (MSA) stone tools such as Levallois cores, Nubian cores, points, and blades in addition to a variety of fossil fauna, some with bone modifications including...
The Middle Stone Age Goes Alpine: Preliminary Results of New Excavations at Ha Soloja Rockshelter, Lesotho, Africa (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While settlement of the world's high plateaus represents a final chapter in Homo sapiens’ global colonization, there were surprisingly early dispersals into high mountain systems. Africa possesses evidence for an early hominin presence in such settings, yet the processes by which human-highland engagements unfolded remain obscure. This paper introduces a...
The Middle Stone Age Record in Egypt and Sudan: Implications for Out of Africa 2 (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. Africa is the continent of origin for Homo sapiens and thus is the source for human colonization of the Old (and eventually New) World. Out of Africa 2 (anatomically, then behaviorally, modern humans) is supported archaeologically by African stone artifact industries found outside of Africa. Two routes widely...
The Middle to Upper Paleolithic Site of Abri des Merveilles in Southwestern France: An Assessment of the Integrity and Research Potential of an Historically-Excavated Museum Collection (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As museum shelves buckle under the weight of virtually forgotten boxes of artifacts, many institutions are questioning the future curation of these historically excavated materials. Much of this material is comprised of Paleolithic artifacts excavated during the infancy of American archaeology abroad. This project was undertaken to evaluate the integrity of a...
The Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition in southern Iberia: New dates from Lapa do Picareiro, Portugal (2017)
The transition from Middle to Upper Paleolithic in western Eurasia remains a hotly debated and intensely researched archaeological problem. Recent developments in radiocarbon dating and genetics have permitted some refinements to our understanding of the spatiotemporal process but many issues remain unresolved. For the Iberian Peninsula, Zilhão’s ‘Ebro Frontier’ model of late Neanderthal survival and subsequent replacement by anatomically modern humans has held sway for over two decades....
Mobility, Land Use, and Technological Organization at the Site of Yangshang, Gansu, China (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The excavation in Yangshang site generated a high-resolution record in the West Loess Plateau of China, and demonstrated that ancient human occupied this region at least since MIS7. In looking for evidence of possible changes in the mobility, land use, and organization of lithic technology that may have been concurrent with the paleoenvironment changes...
Mochena Borago Rockshelter and the Southwest Ethiopian Highlands as a Late Pleistocene Hunter-Gatherer Refugium: The Current State of Research (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. One of the long-term goals of the Southwest Ethiopia Archaeological Project (SWEAP) is to test the hypothesis that the SW Ethiopian highlands were a major refugium for plants, animals, and hunter-gatherer groups during the very arid periods of MIS 4 (~72-59 ka) and MIS 2 (~27-12 ka). In highland Wolaita, SW Ethiopia,...
A Model of the Extinct Palaeo-Agulhas Plain Ecosystem in Southernmost Africa (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Unlike some regions, Africa was not subject to massive and abrupt mammalian extinction events in the Late Quaternary, but some African regions were subject to abrupt extinctions of small numbers of species. The coast of South Africa records such an extinction event near the Pleistocene and Holocene boundary. These extinct species were all adapted to...
Modeling Mobility and Lithic Raw Material Transport in the Late Pleistocene along the Southern Coast of South Africa (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding how hunter-gatherer groups move around the landscape is essential for answering questions about human behavioral ecology and evolution of the social landscape. Lithic raw material proveniencing sheds light on how far people in the past were traveling for toolstone and...
Molecular and Compound-Specific Stable Isotope Analysis of FAMEs on Charred Plant Tissues: A Comparative Approach of Experimental and Archaeological Evidence (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. GC-C-IRMS analysis of FAMEs has been used successfully to distinguish among different animal fat groups. However, plant oils from different tissues (with the exception of seeds) have not been widely investigated even though organic residues from leaf, root, and wood tissues are preserved at archaeological sites (e.g....
Molecular and Isotopic Analyses of Charred and Uncharred Sediments: Investigating Environmental Signatures at the Middle Palaeolithic Rock Shelter of Abric del Pastor (Alcoy, Spain) (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. Our understanding of Late Pleistocene Neanderthal habitats is largely based on anthracological and palynological reconstructions set within broader global climatic frameworks. This approach has yielded important environmental information, however, so far it has not been possible to identify fluctuations in climate or...
The "Molecular Genetics" of Social Learning: Skill Acquisition and Individual Differences in Learning (2018)
Although commonly glossed as social "transmission," the acquisition of knapping skills requires extended interactions between social inputs and individual practice better termed social "reproduction." Individual differences in learning aptitude during this process provide both the raw material for neurocognitive evolution and a potentially significant source of variability in the lithic products used to infer patterns and mechanisms of Paleolithic social learning. Here we present results from an...
Molecular Starch Degradation and Their Fingerprints: Insights from Modern African Taxa (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient starch analysis is a controversial technique, as the polymer’s chemical survivability over long periods of time is not understood. Our objectives are to establish the molecular composition of starch granules from sub-Saharan taxa of ethnobotanical relevance subjected to diagenetic processes, and to determine if these byproducts have diagnostic...