Paleolithic (Other Keyword)
476-499 (499 Records)
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. Crvena Stijena is one of the most significant Paleolithic sites in southeastern Europe. Although scientific excavations conducted here in the 1950s, 1960s, and since 2004 have uncovered several Middle Paleolithic faunal assemblages, the results of the early excavations were...
The Ust’-Menza 14 (Lagernaya) Site and Its Place in the Middle Upper Paleolithic of Southern Siberia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With implications affecting numerous anthropological debates, Paleolithic discoveries in Siberia are important to understand how humans initially spread across Eurasia and into the Americas. Here we introduce Lagernaya, a middle Upper Paleolithic site in the Transbaikal Region of southern Siberia. Three 14C dates from the site's oldest cultural layer...
Was Acheulean Technology Genetically Transmitted? Comparing Variation in Acheulean Tools to Variation in North American Bird Nests (2018)
Acheulean large cutting tools were made across Africa and Eurasia for ~1.5 million years, and show surprisingly little variation for a technology so spatiotemporally vast. One explanation for this puzzling degree of conservatism is that Acheulean tools were not culturally transmitted but rather genetically determined. If this hypothesis is true, then Acheulean tools are more akin to animal technologies such as bird nests than to modern human tools. Here we examine the extent to which the...
Weaving Paths to Healing and Human Rights: Creating Tsunamis of Systemic Change in Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Activating Heritage: Encouraging Substantive Practices for a Just Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Substantive practices for a just future in archaeology require an acknowledgment of the history of discrimination and marginalization within American archaeology. Equity is not achieved through policies supporting marginalized communities within the discipline. Substantive practices and equity are addressed through...
Weichselian Climatic Fluctuations and Neanderthals’ Technical Behaviors in Central Europe (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Weichselian (MIS 5d–MIS 3), the climatic deteriorations and the rapid decrease of the temperatures caused significant difficulties for Neanderthal groups that had to cope with an increased seasonality of resources and faunal turnover. Central European Neanderthals reacted to these new ecological conditions by designing a toolkit composed of...
Were Neandertals the Original Snowbirds? Zooarchaeological Evidence from Greece (2019)
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. Compared to other parts of Eurasia, the southern Balkan Peninsula had a relatively stable climate during the Late Pleistocene. Zooarchaeological materials from the Asprochaliko Rockshelter in northwestern Greece provide evidence for hominin subsistence strategies in the Middle and Upper Paleolithic. In this study, we...
What Drives the Variability in MSA Lithic Assemblages from Sibhudu Cave, South Africa (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. After over a decade of excavation and analysis at the Middle Stone Age site of Sibhudu in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, the team from the University of Tübingen has established a uniquely complete and well-documented record of cultural change from the end or the Middle Pleistocene until...
What Makes a Forager Turn Coastal? An Agent-Based Approach to Coastal Foraging on the Dynamic South African Paleoscape (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Behavioral Ecology at the Coastal Margins: Global Perspectives on Coastal & Maritime Adaptations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Gram for gram, coastal shellfish have significant benefits over many terrestrial resources. They are higher in calories, fats, and proteins than most plants and are available in denser and more predictable patches than mammals. However, there are costs to foraging coastal shellfish....
What’s Shape Got to Do With It? Evaluating the Degree to Which Motion and Material Type Influence Edge Outline of Obsidian Flakes (2018)
Often in the study of stone tools, without the application of microarchaeological studies and the presence of microwear, little is left to distinguish how the tool was used originally and what the tool may have been processing. Was it used for scraping? Sawing? Slicing? Was it slicing bone? Scraping animal hide? Is it even possible for archaeologists to discern such behaviors from the tool without having access to definitive microwear traces and/or residues? In this study, we test whether the...
When Dogs and People Were Buried Together (2018)
Throughout prehistory, dogs and humans have sometimes been interred together in the same grave, in different locations in the world. This practice raises the question of why this practice was so prevalent. Circumstances leading to this practice were variable, but its consistency suggests an underlying factor in common. Using one of the earliest known cases as a point of departure, Bonn-Oberkassel from Germany, we suggest that this underlying factor in common is that dogs and people were regarded...
Where Do We Go from Here? A Review of Prehistoric Forager Mobility in Liguria (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. Due to a suite of topographical and geomorphological factors, Liguria, and the Liguro-Provencal arc more generally, is an interesting natural laboratory in which to revisit some of the debates about forager mobility and its analysis that have unfolded over the past several decades. This paper presents an overview of...
Which Way Did They Go? Using Individual-Based Models to Identify Out of Africa Hominin Dispersal Routes (2018)
There is a broad paleoanthropological consensus that hominins left Africa multiple times during the Pleistocene, but the geographic routes through which they exited the continent remains unclear. Although the Sinai Land Bridge and the Strait of Bab-al-Mandab on the southern end of the Red Sea are commonly implicated as the likely pathways used by early humans during their expansion out of Africa, the evidence supporting each route is still much debated. Here, we identify viable pathways for...
Who Let the Beads Out? The Importance of Bead Manufacture and Exchange at Grassridge Rockshelter, South Africa, and Implications for Understanding Holocene Social Networks 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. Ostrich eggshell and marine shell beads have been linked to the establishment and maintenance of hunter-gatherer social networks in southern Africa, but studies focusing on the methods of their manufacture and especially the social contexts surrounding their manufacture are often overlooked. This research presents a...
Whole Assemblage Behavioral Indicators: Examining Pattern in the Late Pleistocene of the Wadi al-Hasa, Jordan (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the 1980s, surveys in Jordan’s Wadi al-Hasa document dozens of Late Pleistocene hunter-gatherer sites, some of them tested or partly excavated. To track landscape-scale forager mobility and settlement patterns over time, we examine 26 levels from 13 sites dated to the Middle, Upper and Epipaleolithic using aspects of Barton’s WABI research protocol,...
Whole Assemblage Behavioral Indicators: Expectations and Inferences from Surface and Excavated Records at Elandsfontein, South Africa (2018)
Large scale surface surveys represent singular insights into the landscape scale variation in behaviors. Detailed investigations of the spatial distribution of artifacts across large spatial extents allow archaeologists to investigate a landscape as a single site. Surface assemblages have the advantage of large sample sizes and large aerial extents. However, biases associated with the formation processes of surface assemblages often undermine our confidence in the behavioral inferences derived...
Why Build When There Are Caves? Investigating the Construction and Use of a Stone Structure in Pleistocene France (2019)
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. The Late Pleistocene in Western Europe is the origin of the idea of the "caveman," and the majority of research has historically focused on cave sites. In regions of Europe where caves are not present but archaeological evidence is, the assumption is that people used lightweight ephemeral shelters such as...
The Wooden Club: The Oldest Weapon or Myth? (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is a popular idea that archaic humans commonly used wooden clubs as their weapons. This is not based on archaeological finds, which are minimal from the Pleistocene, but rather on a few ethnographic analogies and the association of this weapon with simple technology. This paper presents the first quantitative cross-cultural analysis of the use of...
The World’s Largest Archaeological Jigsaw Puzzle: Excavations at Juukan Gorge 2022–2023 (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Juukan Gorge: The Story of Destruction, Excavation and Rebuilding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2022 a team of archaeologists in collaboration with the PKK People has been re-excavating the Juukan 2 site. Under the rubble of the blast, we have found an in situ cultural deposit with largely intact material culture. This paper describes the process and methodology we have used to find this delicate sedimentary...
You're Going to Carry that Weight a Long Time (2018)
Mobility is a phenomenon of importance across all past and present societies. For hunter-gatherers, mobility structures ecological strategies, social organization, and response to environmental change. For prehistoric societies, we cannot observe mobility but it is possible to study it through a proxy record of discarded material items and biological remains that form the archaeological record. Increasingly archaeological practice has shifted from proposing intuitive links between mobility and...
You’ve Got Tools: Evaluating Comparability Among 3D Lithic Angle Measurement Tools (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is widely accepted that angle measurements taken on lithic artifacts form a crucial part of lithic analysis. Thanks to advances in 3D-scanning technology, researchers now have virtual angle-measuring options. However, since these new virtual tools were created independently and thus are utilizing their own “suite” of algorithms dependent on the...
Zooarchaeological Analysis of a Late Pleistocene Cave Site in Northwestern Italy, Arma Veirana (2018)
Italy serves as a critically important region for better understanding the late Pleistocene as it was home to Neandertals and other hominins. Archaeological excavation in northwestern Italy at the cave site of Arma Veirana, with layers dating back to 44 ka, intends to provide insight into this ambiguous period in prehistory. Preliminary data from zooarchaeological analysis of 1,414 specimens indicate that Neandertals primarily hunted medium-sized bovid/cervids, including Capra ibex, Cervus...
Zooarchaeological Analysis of a Late Pleistocene Interglacial-Glacial Transition at Pinnacle Point Site 5-6, South Africa (2018)
Understanding if and to what extent early anatomically modern humans adapted to dramatic climatic events is essential to human origins research. Pinnacle Point — a complex of cave sites and rockshelters along the southern coast of South Africa — offers a unique opportunity to study human adaptability through time. The long sequence at Pinnacle Point Site 5-6 (PP5-6) spans 164 - 44 thousand years ago and encompasses two Interglacial to Glacial Marine Isotope Stage transitions (Stages 5-4-3)....
Zooarchaeological insights into modern human mobility at Riparo Bombrini (2018)
Human-environmental interactions can be discussed on different scales, and from diverse perspectives and specializations in archaeology. We propose to examine human mobility on the local scale of Riparo Bombrini, a key site in Northwest Italy to understand Anatomically Modern Human dispersals along the Mediterranean coast during the early Upper Paleolithic. Previous studies including spatial, lithic, and raw material data revealed distinct mobility signatures from the site’s two Protoaurignacian...
Zooarchaeology and Taphonomy of Unit III in the Middle Paleolithic Site of Nesher Ramla (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Levantine Middle Paleolithic period plays a crucial role in human origins research, encompassing vast cognitive and technological developments. Faunal remains are an important source of knowledge regarding hunting patterns, reflecting both human behavior and subsistence strategies. This paper addresses questions of hunting, transport, butchery patterns and...