Paleolithic (Other Keyword)
301-325 (499 Records)
Kece Cave is located in Kahramanmaras - Elbistan Province in Turkey. The first excavation was carried out in 2015 and since that year, it has been continued by excavation team that includes different university experts. According to preliminary reports, first excavations were realized on terraces in front of the cave and inside. Preliminary findings have been remarkable. Although during the last season excavation, most amazing findings than before were obtained in the terrace excavation area and...
New Excavations at Border Cave: Preliminary Reflections on Stratigraphy and Site Formation Processes (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Border Cave rock shelter, formed in Early Jurassic fragmental rocks of the Jozini Formation on the western scarp of the Lebombo Mountains, KwaZulu-Natal, has a long history of archaeological investigation starting with Raymond Dart in 1934. Phases of informal and formal excavations have yielded remarkable archaeological assemblages including five hominin...
New Insights into the Chronology of Late Middle Paleolithic Occupations in Southwestern France (2018)
The southwest of France is well-known for the wealth and number of sites attributed to the Middle Paleolithic. The archaeological sequences reflect an apparent heterogeneity of Neanderthal behaviors, based on the apparent variability of the lithic technological systems adopted by human groups over time. This has led to a range of different interpretations of the archaeological evidence. What is apparent is that a reliable chronology is key if we are to understand Middle Paleolithic lithic...
New Insights on Neanderthal Subsistence Strategies in Central Europe Using Faunal and ZooMS Analyses at Crvena Stijena (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. While considerable research on Middle and Late Pleistocene subsistence has been conducted in Western Europe, little is known about variation in the hunting abilities and dietary behavior of Neanderthal populations in Central Europe. Here, we present new faunal results from...
New Research at Enval: A Middle Magdalenian Site in the Massif Central of France (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present new research at Enval, a Middle Magdalenian rock shelter site in the Massif Central of France. Lithic materials previously recovered indicate far ranging contacts in multiple directions. Artifacts from our 2018 excavations reflect intensive use of local raw materials, suggesting that use of allochthonous materials was not simply a response to...
A New Semi-quantitative Method for Identifying Carnivore-Specific Chewing Damage Patterns (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Celebrating 20 Years of Support: Current Work by Recipients of the Dienje Kenyon Memorial Fellowship for Zooarchaeologists" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hypotheses of hominin scavenging from different felid species have been proposed, but the ability to distinguish between the taphonomic patterns inflicted by different felid species in the fossil record is currently underdeveloped. Previous efforts to identify...
New Simulation Tools for the Design and Assessment of Subsurface Testing Programs: Dig It Design It and Dig It Check It (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology II (QUANTARCH II)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is a general awareness among archaeologists that the intensity of a sampling program, i.e. the number of pits, their size and their spacing, has a strong bearing on discovery rates. However, rarely is the effect of this relationship explicitly assessed due to the difficulty of running the required mathematical models....
No Fire without Wood? Some Reflections on Late Pleistocene Pyrotechnology in Northern Tundra Environments (East Siberia, Interior Alaska) (2018)
The use of alternate fuels such as grasses, bones or dung has often been interpreted as a typical response of Late Pleistocene (LP) hunter-gatherers to harsh environments, in which woody resources are scarce. In the context of early human dispersal from south-east Siberia into the Americas, the question of prehistoric migration and settlement is closely linked to the one of fuel availability, fire being considered, to the same extent as food, a vital element for survival. However, data regarding...
Nor Geghi-1 and the Process of Late Middle Pleistocene Technological Evolution in the Armenia Highlands (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. Current data from Africa and Eurasia suggest that the intercontinental transition from bifacial to hierarchical core technology occurred independently within different geographically dispersed hominin populations already adept at a variety of complex knapping procedures inherent to the Acheulean. The episodic...
A North American Plains Perspective on the East European Paleolithic (2018)
For historical reasons, the Middle and Upper Paleolithic record of Europe has been viewed largely through the prism of rockshelters in the southwestern corner of the continent. Europe is dominated geographically, however, by an immense plain that stretches from the Carpathians to the Ural Mountains, much of which is devoid of natural shelters. Vance Holliday has made a significant contribution to the study of soils, stratigraphy, and site-formation process in open-air Middle and Upper...
North of the Wall: Archaeo-ecological Approaches to Scotland’s elusive Paleolithic Past (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. For more than a century, Paleolithic Scotland was missing from the textbooks, presumed nonexistent. A low-density of archaeological finds was compounded by a research tradition that persistently excluded the possibility of human settlement at the extreme edge of north-west Europe prior to the Holocene, a situation at odds...
(Nut) Cracking the Code of Primate Cognition (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Old Technology, New Methodology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of percussive actions to access encased foods—e.g., nuts—has been proposed as a viable hypothesis to explain the emergence of stone tool technology in the hominin lineage. Observations of extant nonhuman primates such as chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) or black-striped capuchins (Sapajus libidinosus) nut-cracking have been used to support the...
Oh Deer: A Zooarchaeological Approach to Understanding Hominin Behavior during the Last Interglacial (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our understanding of hominin subsistence behavior during the Last Interglacial is limited. Le Grand Abri aux Puces (GAP), a cave in Southern France in the foothills of the Alps, can provide a closer look into subsistence behavior as most of its layers are dated to the Last Interglacial. It has been suggested that hominins living around GAP during...
The Old Stone Age in the Shammakh-to-Ayl Archaeological Survey Area, west-central Jordan (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chipped stone artifacts are nearly ubiquitous throughout the Middle East, and Jordan is no exception. Virtually indestructible, they testify to a human presence that extends back as far as 1.5 million years. They are commonly found on the deflated uplands of the...
On the Edge of the Kalahari: New Excavations of the Middle Stone Age Deposits at Olieboomspoort, South Africa (2021)
This is an abstract from the "From Veld to Coast: Diverse Landscape Use by Hunter-Gatherers in Southern Africa from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Olieboomspoort is one of the few rockshelters in South Africa documenting phases of use going back to the Acheulean and up until the very end of the Later Stone Age. Previous work has focused on the recent phases, consistent with traces left by the last...
On the Margin, Marginal Too? A Western Outpost of Paleolithic Cantabrian Cave Art (NW Iberia) (2021)
This is an abstract from the "From the Plains to the Plateau: Papers in Honor of James D. Keyser" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Franco-Cantabrian group of cave art ranks among the best known examples of Paleolithic symbolic behavior. For more than a century no decorated cave was reported beyond the Nalón Valley in the center of Asturias, until the carvings and paintings from Cova Eirós were discovered. At more than 100 km from the Nalón,...
On the Origin of Cultures (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. As an analytic category, a culture shares many of the same difficulties that a species has in biology: notably, fuzzy boundaries, temporal instability, and extensive substructuring, which render it difficult to define adequately and comprehensively. Nevertheless, the symbolic world or semiotic matrix that...
The Ontological Mammoth Body: Varieties of the Human-Mammoth Ritual Drama Mediated by Cultural Interactions with Mammoth Remains in Pavlonian Moravia and Mezinian Ukraine (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnohistoric sources show hunters burnt the bones of prey or hung them on trees, heaped them on piles, deposited them in bogs, etc., in order to propitiate nature spirits such as the “Master of Animals” for game resurrection...
Opening Remarks: The Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology of Non-modern Humans (2018)
The study of archaic hominins (non-modern humans) poses some unique challenges to archaeological interpretation, and relies on close integration of archaeological data with those from other allied fields including palaeoanthropology, genetics, primatology, and ethnography. In this opening paper, I reflect on some of the recent advances and discoveries in these fields which are changing the ways in which we both conduct and conceptualise research in to non-modern humans in archaeology. I then...
Organic Molecular Proxies for Fire in Archaeological Sediments (2018)
A number of different direct and indirect proxies are used to identify fire at archaeological sites. We propose a new organic molecular proxy for identification of anthropogenic fire in archaeological sediments, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). These molecules are a byproduct of the incomplete combustion of organic biomass, and are preserved well on deep time scales. We applied this proxy to Lusakert Cave, a Middle Paleolithic site in the Hrazdan Gorge, Armenia. From these same samples,...
Organization of Technology at Solak-1, an Upper Paleolithic Open-Air Site in the Armenian Highlands (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. Solak-1 is an Upper Paleolithic open-air site located in central Armenia discovered by the Kotayk Survey Project. An obsidian-rich lithic assemblage totaling about 2,500 artifacts was recovered from six stratified horizons and subjected to techno-typological attribute analysis. Core reduction appears predominantly...
An Organization of Technology Model and Archaeological Inference (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the late twentieth century, the investigation of settlement patterns and mobility were considered important archaeological endeavors. Analyzing stone tools assemblages to make inferences of group mobility was based on utilizing simple dichotomies. For stone tools, the concepts of curated and expedient dominated thinking. Likewise, the constructs of...
Origins of Parietal Art: Evidence from the Archaeological Record (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The interpretation of drawings and engravings rely on our unique ability to internally process visual information and identify recognizable patterns. This same ability processes imaginary patterns, such as animals and faces of people in geological formations, clouds, and stars. The phenomenon of identifying imaginary patterns, referred to as “pareidolia,”...
Out with a Whimper or a Bang? Hunter-Gatherer Response to the End of the African Humid Period in Northern Malawi (2018)
The modern climate of the southernmost African Rift Valley is characterized by a single warm-wet season, which receives almost all annual precipitation. The other six months are arid, and surface water is confined to major river and lake features. In the northern basin of Lake Malawi, at the southern extent of the modern ITCZ, core records show a rapid increase in water surface temperatures peaking at ~5.5 ka, followed by a major expansion of grasslands. This coincides with the end of the...
An Overview of the Mousterian and Final Epigravettian at Arma Veirana (Liguria, Northwestern Italy) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in the Prehistory of Liguria and Neighboring Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents preliminary results of the first four years of archaeological investigation at the cave site of Arma Veirana, located near Erli (Savona), in western Liguria. The site has yielded in situ Middle and Upper Paleolithic deposits containing a variety of artifacts. One of the project’s principal goals to...