Paleolithic (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vasilije Marojevic. Zoran Kilibarda. Gilbert Tostevin. Alec Siurek.

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. The Crvena Stijena rockshelter is located on the Banjani Karst Plateau in westernmost Montenegro. Excavations at one of the longest human occupation sequences in the Balkans yielded 20 Middle Paleolithic layers containing numerous artifacts and faunal remains. Recent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jiaqi Wang. Xuewei Zhang. Chunxue Wang. Lishuang Sheng.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Taiziling locality, buried in the second terrace near the Prince Mausoleum of the Qing Dynasty is located in the Sungezhuang village, Jizhou County, Tianjin City, which was discovered in 2005 and excavated in October 2021, covering an area of 50m2. In this excavation, over 100 artifacts were unearthed. The lithic assemblage includes cores, flakes,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Pedersen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Southwest Asia ground stone tools used in food processing, like mortars and querns, started proliferating at the end of the Paleolithic. Recently these tools have received increased attention with researchers attempting to establish what food these tools were used to process through microscopic use-wear and residue analysis. However, there is an aspect...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Knut Bretzke.

Jebel Faya is a key Paleolithic site in Arabia. The site provides important data on the history of human occupation of desert environments during the Late Pleistocene. One central question is if the observed diachronic pattern of occupation is largely driven by climatic change, as often assumed, or if other factors such as adaptation processes play significant roles. Based on the assumption that survival in the often unpredictable environments of SE Arabia requires increased behavioral...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marie Soressi. Vera Aldeias. Wei Chu. Leonardo Carmignani. Igor Djakovic.

This is an abstract from the "Developing Paleolithic Excavation Methods for the Twenty-First Century" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavation involves working both in side-view (i.e., with profiles), to recognize the stratigraphy, and in plan-view to excavate features and layers. Here we want to elaborate on the advantages of working mainly in side-view at Paleolithic sites with long, complex stratigraphies with high find densities. Sieving is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jayson Gill. Daniel Adler. Jennifer Sherriff. Keith Wilkinson. Hayk Haydosyan.

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. The recently excavated site of Ptghavan-4 in the Armenian Highlands provides rare data on Middle Paleolithic hominin behaviors during the early Upper Pleistocene. The site contains a dense accumulation of lithic artifacts that are Middle Paleolithic in character within a pedogenically modified aeolian deposit, which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cindy Hsin-yee Huang. John Murray. Sydney James. Nicolas Hansen. Jonathan Paige.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The issue of inter-analyst variation is common across nearly all archaeological artifacts. Within lithic analysis, there are many quantitative and qualitative assessments that could vary among analysts, which can cause problems in interpretation of stone tool assemblages. In addition, the effects of raw material on inter-analyst variation is not entirely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angelina Curley. Sylvia Wemanya. Emmanuel Ndiema. Jonathan Reeves. David R. Braun.

Stone artifact weathering is important for understanding the formational history of surface and in situ assemblages. While much of this work has focused on chert and other crypto-crystalline sillicas, the weathering of basalt is under-studied. As a large proportion of the Early Stone Age record consists of basalt, it is necessary to explore the weathering process of this material. Characterizing basalt weathering currently relies on the subjective characterization of both mechanical and chemical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Lee. Jamie Inwood. Samson Koromo. Lucas Olesilau. Julio Mercader.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tanzania’s Oldupai Gorge is a flagship human origins research site, yet less recognised is that the lands surrounding Oldupai are home to the pastoralist Maasai society. Even though scientists have, for over a century, sought to illuminate the shared past of our species in what many regard to be a cradle of humankind, there has seldom been meaningful and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sebastien Joannin. Amy Cromartie.

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. The numerous archaeological discoveries in the Lesser Caucasus document the crucial role that this territory had for humans more than 2 Ma. In particular, the scientific debate has highlighted its strategic position for phases of migration “out of Africa,” and expansion to the Eurasian continent. The role of climate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Klembara.

This is an abstract from the "The Future Is Fluid...and So Was the Past: Challenging the 'Normative' in Archaeological Interpretations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies of Upper Paleolithic burials in Europe have illuminated several aspects of Upper Paleolithic lifeways, from health and diet, to status and social organization. These studies, while recognizing the rarity of Upper Paleolithic burials, interpret the Upper Paleolithic burial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Zorn. Jonathan Haws.

Ongoing excavations and research at the cave site of Lapa do Picareiro in the Estremadura region of Portugal have recovered a large number of faunal remains, including thousands of rabbit bones. These remains have yielded new data and insight on human exploitation of small prey during the Upper Paleolithic. This poster focuses on the spatial and temporal distribution of rabbit remains within the cave and the taphonomic processes acting on these bones. The work builds upon previous research using...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Hunt. Evan Hill. Paula Reimer. Graeme Barker.

Land snails have a radiocarbon ecology which leads to offsets in shell radiocarbon age, relative to contemporary biogenic carbon. We describe new methods for evaluating and calculating this offset. We radiocarbon date and apply the new methods to land snail food debris, from the deep MSA to Neolithic sequence in the Haua Fteah cave, NE Libya. Oxcal modelling of the resulting 136 dates over ~45000 years shows the site was used for short episodes separated by long periods of abandonment. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Utting. Agustin Capriati. Annette Oertle. Dylan Gaffney.

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation will introduce the Raja Ampat Project, a multidisciplinary effort to explore evidence for 1) the initial settlement of eastern Wallacea, and 2) how humans adapted to and transformed island environments over time. The Project has four main strands: 1) excavations of new material, 2) material culture...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dominique Meyer. Eric Lo. Sabrina Trinh. Emily Zheng. Falko Kuester.

Arma Veirana is a Middle/Upper Paleolithic cave site of the Maritime Alps of Liguria, Italy, which has the potential to offer insight into the interaction between Modern Humans and the Neandertals. Preliminary excavations have shown a continuous occupation between the Middle and Upper Paleolithic time periods, yet the complexity of the cave morphology and geology have made it difficult to isolate erosion as well as environmental and non-natural factors to understand the full image of hominin...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Kelly. Madeline Mackie. Andrew Kandel.

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. Researchers have long been aware of an apparently rapid increase ca. 40,000–45,000 BP in the frequency of “symbolic” artifacts in the Old World paleolithic record. However, some hypothesize that if not for taphonomic loss the data would instead show a gradual increase in such artifacts’ frequency during the Middle Stone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nolan Ferar. Jonathan Haws. João Cascalheira.

This is an abstract from the "Expedient Technological Behavior: Global Perspectives and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Expediency, in the sense of applying low-cost, informal technological solutions, characterizes a great deal of hominin technological behavior over time. The degree to which expedient technological behaviors are culturally-laden versus culturally-void remains an open question—one with important implications for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aylar Abdolahzadeh. George Leader. Tamara Dogandzic. Li Li. Harold Dibble.

Archaeologists have long studied the effects of raw material variation on different aspects of lithic technology, primarily focusing on raw material availability and nodule size and shape. This paper presents the results of a controlled experiment designed to compare different rock types (obsidian, flint, basalt, quartzite, and silcrete) and assess their effects on flake production. The experiment utilizes a mechanical robot that applies force to pre-shaped cores, controlling for known...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ismael Sánchez-Morales.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The cave of El’Aliya on the Atlantic coast of Morocco contained a Middle Stone Age (MSA) occupational sequence that produced Aterian lithic assemblages (i.e. with tanged tools) dated to Marine Isotope Stage 3 (Layers 6 and 5). The site was excavated during the late 1930s and 1940s and the lithic assemblages from the MSA deposits were originally described...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Conard.

This is an abstract from the "Examining Spatial-Temporal Variation in the Lithic Technology of the Early Upper Paleolithic" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of the Swabian Aurignacian goes back to fieldwork in the 1880s in Bockstein Cave in the Lone Valley. Subsequent generations of archaeologists have excavated well-known sites including Hohlenstein-Stadel and Vogelherd in the Lone Valley and Geißenklösterle, Hohle Fels, and Sirgenstein...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ivor Jankovic. Darko Komšo. Siniša Radovic. James Ahern. Rory Becker.

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 recent decade saw a rapid rise in the research on Paleolithic sites in Istria. This renewed interest started with field surveys and continued with new research projects aimed at better understanding of biocultural patterns and adaptations of hunter-gatherers in the region during the Pleistocene. The research included new...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Montserrat Sanz Borràs. Joan Daura. Dan Cabanes. Natalia Eguez. Ángel Carrancho.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Controlling the use of fire was a technological milestone in human evolution. The beginnings of the control of fire remain controversial because preserved hearths containing a combination of combustion residues are easily altered and their identification in the archaeological record can be hindered by taphonomic biases. Excavations at the Gruta da Aroeira...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Milena Carvalho. Lukas Friedl. Michael Benedetti. João Cascalheira. Jonathan Haws.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Research into the Late Pleistocene of Europe" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Portuguese Estremadura (central Portugal), is an understudied region in Paleolithic research with several key Middle and Upper Paleolithic sites that have provided important information on human lifeways in westernmost Europe during the Late Pleistocene. One of these is Lapa do Picareiro, a rare type of site on the Iberian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andy Herries. Matt Caruana. Alex Blackwood. Matthew Meredith-Williams. Coen Wilson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Amanzi Springs Acheulian site in South Africa was first excavated by Ray Inskeep and then Hilary Deacon for his Masters project in the 1960s. Deacon excavated two spring he designated Areas 1 and 2 and this work suggested that Amanzi Springs preserved stratified Acheulian bearing deposits, something rare in the South African archaeological record. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ilaria Patania. Susan Mentzer. Xiaohong Wu. David Cohen. Paul Goldberg.

The sites of Xianrendong (Jiangxi) and Yuchanyan (Hunan), China, contain the earliest pottery yet discovered, dating respectively 20,000 cal BP and 18,600 cal BP. This pottery is found in otherwise Late Paleolithic, hunter-gatherer contexts. To understand human activities at these caves we employed micromorphology and -FTIR on the sediments. Here we present the results of analysis of the layers containing combustion episodes, which suggest low heating temperatures at both sites. and infer...