Paleolithic (Other Keyword)
51-75 (499 Records)
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. Chronometric dating of Late Pleistocene environmental changes and archaeological sites can be refined by correlations with precisely dated volcanic isochrons, stalagmites, and marine isotope stages (MIS). Lake Malawi cores have volcanic ash from the Toba super-eruption, dated ~74 ka at levels previously dated to ~62.5...
Can archaeo-faunal data track site-specific occupational intensity? Case studies from the Late Pleistocene in the southern Cape of South Africa (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ubiquity of archaeo-faunal remains and discarded bone at Paleolithic sites make these useful datasets for investigating a range of site formation processes, including anthropogenic site-use activity. Occupational intensity is a common theme in current research and is often linked to demographic changes in the past. Given its association with early...
Can HBE Help Explain Variation in the Presence of Blue Duiker (Philantomba monticola) throughout the Middle Stone Age at Sibudu Cave (South Africa)? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Do Good Things Come in Small Packages? Human Behavioral Ecology and Small Game Exploitation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Blue duiker (Philantomba monticola) is a small, forest dwelling bovid present throughout Central and southern Africa. The species remains an important source of bushmeat in Central Africa, and in southern Africa, its exploitation dates at least as far back as 77,000 years ago. At the Middle Stone...
Can we talk about modern human behavior in non-Homo sapiens? (2018)
Discerning what makes Homo sapiens distinctive among the rest of the species on the planet has been a difficult task. One suggestion has been our use of symbolic culture, the use and transmission of symbols intergenerationally. There is much discussion, however, about who the first ‘symbol users’ were, partly due to debates as to what actually makes something ‘symbolic.’ In this paper, I discus how anthropologists first came to use symbol as the sine qua non of modern human behavior. Then, using...
Carbon Enamel Isotopes as Proxy for Dietary Changes in the Omo-Turkana Basin between 2 and 1.4 Ma (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite the numerous hominin fossils found in the Omo-Turkana Basin dating to between 2.0 and 1.4 Ma., a resolved understanding of their dietary ecology has been challenging due to limited research on similar patterns in contemporaneous large mammals In this study, we use a sample (n = 390) of enamel δ13C values of six Bovidae, Suidae, and Equidae taxa as...
Challenging Current Perspectives on Late Pleistocene Stone Toolkits across Beringia through Use-Wear Analysis (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research and Challenges in Arctic and Subarctic Cultural Heritage Studies" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Microblade technologies are a structuring component of the Late Pleistocene archaeology across the Bering Strait because of their wide chronological and geographical extension. To fully understand the technoeconomical strategies underlying the success of this innovative toolkit in periglacial environments,...
Change in Mobility and Site Occupation during the Late Pleistocene in Korea (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stone artifact assemblages can be an important source of information about hunter-gatherer mobility and subsistence, according to behavioral ecological theory that links technological changes to environmental adaptation. We examined stone artifacts from 28 sites in South Korea to investigate technological innovations during the Late Pleistocene and their...
Changing Perspectives for the Palaeolithic Research of the Japanese Archipelago (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Issues in Japanese Archaeology (2019 Archaeological Research in Asia Symposium)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Apart from sporadic finds of human bones and artifacts, systematic research on the Palaeolithic began in Japan with the Iwajuku excavation in 1949. In spite of the relatively short history of 70 years, and the negative impact of the "Fujimura Scandal" of 2000, which resulted in nullification of...
A Characterization of Site Formation Processes at FxJj34, Northen Kenya (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Any inference of behavior based upon the spatial distribution of archaeological material requires an understanding of site formation processes. Natural agents, such as water flow, may be responsible for post-depositional alteration of buried materials and can result in spatial patterns which mask the behavioral processes associated with the initial deposition...
Characterizing Argentinian Quartzite and Polish 'Chocolate' Flint for Sourcing Studies (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The application of reflectance spectroscopy in sourcing studies of quartzite and flint illustrates the broad potential that the technique has in helping us explain human behavior using lithic provenance data. An ongoing line of research is to characterize tool stone used by prehistoric peoples in order to source artifacts back to known deposits. The large...
Characterizing Ephemeral Paleolithic Occupations at Arma Veirana (Liguria, Italy) (2017)
This paper presents a description of recently studied assemblages from Middle and Upper Paleolithic levels at the site of Arma Veirana, a large cave located in the mountainous hinterland of Liguria. While one Mousterian level shows an intense occupation, all other levels indicate rather short-lived, low intensity occupations. Beyond technological and typological analyses of these assemblages undertaken to characterize them, we also report preliminary data on raw material procurement patterns...
Charred Organic Matter in the Middle and Later Stone Record in South Africa: Exploring Multiple Anthropogenic Processes and Origins (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. Middle and Later Stone caves and rockshelters in South Africa are commonly rich in organic matter. The formation history of the organic component in the archaeological deposits is still unclear and several natural and anthropogenic processes can be considered. This paper will focus on a discussion of possible anthropogenic...
Charting Late Pleistocene Social Networking in Southern Africa Using Strontium Isotope Geochemistry (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. The roots of long-distance social networking run deeper than Facebook. At some point in the Pleistocene, hunter-gatherers began exchanging ‘non-utilitarian’ artifacts like beads and other ornaments over hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of kilometers. Among ethnographically documented foragers these networks...
Chemical Diagenesis of Charcoal and Charred Organic Material in South African Middle Stone Age Rockshelter Sites (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. Several South African Middle Stone Age (MSA) sites contain deposits rich in anthropogenic materials whose preservation was impacted by extreme burial environments. The specific chemistries of the burial environments are evidenced by dissolution of archaeological materials and/or precipitation of secondary minerals. In sites...
Choose Your Weapon: Material Selection for Middle Pleistocene Spears (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Perishable Weaponry Studies: Developing Perspectives from Dated Contexts to Experimental Analyses" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The earliest archaeological weapons consist of one-piece wooden spears and throwing sticks from the Middle Pleistocene. These earliest weapons were made by late H. heidelbergensis and/or early H. neanderthalensis and were crafted from coniferous wood from at least 400,000 BP....
Citizen Science and Palaeolithic Art: Investigating the Visual Psychological Background to 15,800-year-old Engravings Online (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present findings from our Citizen Science-focused project that combines Pleistocene Archaeology, traceology, and visual psychology experimentation to offer new perspectives on Ice Age art. Our project visually explores the content and wider context of the 15,800-year-old German Gönnersdorf/Andernach Upper Palaeolithic engraved plaquettes (portable...
Clues about Neanderthal Fire Technology and Climate from a Microstratrigraphic Study of Unit XXIV at 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. A trend in the past few decades of archaeological research is to apply different microstratigraphic techniques, which provide clues about behavioral and paleoenvironmental aspects of past societies. At Crvena Stijena (Montenegro), a Middle Paleolithic site under current...
The Coevolution of Niche Construction and Niche Adaptation in the Hominin Lineage: Toward Understanding Culture (2019)
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. One of the most significant, yet understudied, subjects in paleoanthropology is the emergence of culture and its resulting transition from biological evolution to human-specific biocultural evolution. Scholarship on this topic has historically been lacking partly due to an absence of a coherent framework...
Cognitive Archaeology and the Minimum Necessary Competence Problem (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cognitive archaeology faces the problem of minimum necessary competence: as the most sophisticated thinking of ancient hominins may have been in domains that leave no archaeological signature, it is safest to assume that tool production and use reflects only the lower boundary of cognitive capacities. Cognitive archaeology involves selecting a model from...
Combining Strontium and Sulphur Isotope Analysis to Reconstruct Paleolithic Reindeer Mobility (2024)
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. Understanding the movement patterns of past animals is key to unravelling Paleolithic hunter-gatherer mobility and landscape use. Strontium isotope analysis (87Sr/86Sr) has long been used as a proxy for provenance studies based on the high correlation between strontium values in faunal tissues and underlying lithology....
A Commensal-Prey Relationship in Early Mainland Southeast Asia? The Case of the Burmese Hare (Lepus peguensis) (2018)
Rabbits and hares are often a central part of human subsistence strategies in both the past and the present. However, the Burmese hare (Lepus peguensis) – the sole member of the family Leporidae indigenous to mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) – is rarely eaten today, and its status in the past is unclear. Although this taxon is currently abundant across a wide geographic range, it has a poor zooarchaeological record during the Pleistocene and Holocene. Identified specimens occur sporadically in...
Confirming the Subtropical Paleoecology of Yahuai Cave in Guangxi, China, at 120 Kya through the Taphonomic Analysis of Rodent Remains (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the main questions in human evolution concerns the dispersal of modern humans into Eurasia. Given the current tropical environment of South China, we may wonder whether early modern humans entering this region could penetrate the rainforest to forage for food, and indeed whether the environment in this area was...
Constructing Identity in the Swabian Aurignacian (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. The human body plays a significant role in constructing identity. According to Bourdieu (1974, 1976), the habitus, displays the social status and the role of the individual within a society. Group membership manifests itself with symbols like personal ornaments, the choice of emblematic objects, and their...
Construction of Pleistocene Geochronologies in Central Africa: Luminescence Dating in Northern Malawi (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. Advances in understanding the Pleistocene archaeology of Africa depend on well-dated models of human behavioral change. Portions of southern Africa with limestone caves and eastern Africa with volcanic tephra have datable materials (uranium and argon, respectively) beyond the limit of the radiocarbon clock (50ka)....
Contextual Taphonomy in Zooarchaeology: From Refuse Behavior to Site-Occupation Intensity in Levantine Epipaleolithic Camps (2018)
In zooarchaeology, Contextual Taphonomy means the integration of the stratigraphic and contextual data with zooarchaeological and taphonomic data, to clarify the 'life history' of a faunal sub-assemblage in a given context. The approach uses animal remains to explain variability among site features by looking into the differential taphonomic histories of the bones, most importantly in the post-discard stage. Archaeofaunal remains are normally ubiquitous in foragers’ camps and their histories are...