Holocene (Other Keyword)
1-25 (32 Records)
We report on archaeological and paleo-environmental fieldwork carried out in the area around Aitape, northern Papua New Guinea during June and July of 2014, targeted at understanding human response to environmental and climatic variability during the mid- to late-Holocene. We employ a multi-proxy approach to paleo-environmental reconstruction including geochemical and paleo-botanical analysis of stream and river bank sediments to examine local manifestations of Holocene climatic variability and...
Archaeological Excavation at the Ferris dune Site (48CR310) (2014)
Archaeological excavations at the Ferris Dune site (48CR310) yielded two buried cultural components. Component 1 dated to the Late Prehistoric Uinta phase (950 ± 30 years B.P.), and Component 2 dated to the Late Archaic Deadman Wash phase (1920 ± 30 years B.P.). Component 1 represents a relatively well preserved hunting camp where at least two bison were processed, while the cultural materials associated with Component 2 were appreciably more ephemeral and representative of a nondescript short...
Archaeological Study of Ostrich Eggshell Beads Collected from Shuidonggou (2017)
Ostrich eggshell beads and fragments collected from Shuidonggou (SDG) reflect primordial art and symbolic behavior of modern humans. Based on stratigraphic data and OSL dating, these ostrich eggshell beads probably date to the Early Holocene ( 10 ka BP). Two different prehistoric manufacturing pathways are usually used in the manufacture of ostrich eggshell beads in the Upper Paleolithic. According to statistical analyses of the characteristics of ostrich eggshell beads, Pathway 1 is identified...
Archaeology of Fueguian Islands: Tierra del Fuego, Dawson and Navarino, Human Settlement and Cultural Interaction (Patagonia, Chile) (2015)
The fueguian archipelago, dominated by three mayor islands named Tierra del Fuego, Dawson and Navarino, is located in the southernmost end of South America. Peopled by hunter-gatherer societies since c. 10.500 BP, the interior sea formations date to Early Holocene. Shoreline environments have evidence of specialized marine adaptation since c. 6.500 BP, after which colonization has been generally interpreted as homogenous, stable and continuous. Ethnohistoric and ethnographic records account for...
Assessing Settlement Dynamics in the San Juan Islands and Northwestern Washington, a Bayesian Approach (2021)
This is an abstract from the "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent developments in Bayesian approaches to radiocarbon dating have enabled reexaminations of questions of population dynamism in the Salish Sea. This study expands on Taylor et al. 2011 using Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) and an expanded data set of 538 radiocarbon dates from academic and cultural resource management...
Bone Tool Technology in West Africa: Contributions from the Diallowali Site System, Senegal (2019)
This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Worked bone has a long history across the African continent, occurring as early as the Middle Stone Age in eastern and southern Africa. However, since the beginning of the Holocene, barbed and un-barbed points – associated with the so-called ‘African Aqualithic’ peaking at 9,000 BP – have likewise been recovered from sites within Sahelian and...
Ceramics from the EKW #1 Site (48NA969), Natrona County, Wyoming (2010)
The EKW #1 site (48NA969) was located during a class III survey of the Edness Kimball Wilkins State Park in 1984 (Eckles 1984). The site appeared as a large surface scatter of artifacts and bone, covering over five acres. The site was considered unusual at the time due to the high numbers of prehistoric ceramic artifacts. Late Prehistoric age projectile points, a variety of chipped stone tools, shell beads and animal bone were also recorded during the surface inventory. The density of surface...
The Crooks Gap Housepit Site and Other Nearby Mid-Holocene Housepits (2012)
This article summarizes excavation results at the Crooks Gap Housepit site (Site 48FR6260) completed by Cardno ENTRIX in 2010 and then compares those results with 20 other excavated housepits at eight sites located within 20 km of the site (Figure 1). The results are provided in more detail in Peterson and Smith (2012). The Crooks Gap Housepit site is a multicomponent site situated in aeolian deposits near Crooks Creek in southeastern Fremont County, Wyoming. One of the components contains the...
Demography, Heritage, and Archaeology: A View from Australia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents a cautionary case study in heritage and archaeology from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, which is undergoing a rapid transformation due to an unprecedented program of urban and regional development. Following the author’s previous work in...
Developing intra- and inter-continental research networks for the study of human adaptations to Lateglacial and early Holocene environmental changes (2016)
Over the last decade our knowledge of human-environment interaction in prehistory has been radically transformed. It has become increasingly apparent that prehistoric humans had to cope with a vast range of different environmental changes that had their own particular temporal and spatial dynamics. These changes ranged from millennial- and continental-scale ecosystem turnover and sea-level rise, to centennial- and hemispheric-scale abrupt climate change events, to extreme events such as tsunamis...
Early Holocene aridity and the first farmers of Europe (2015)
The spread of agriculture into Europe from its Near Eastern heartland was an important cultural event, the causes of which have been debated for many decades. DNA analyses are increasingly providing insights into the genetic inheritance of Europe's first farmers, yet the triggers for their initial migration remain elusive. The earliest agricultural sites in Europe appear to be those situated in coastal Greece, while more fertile inland areas, such as the Thracian Plain, were settled centuries to...
Early- and Middle-Stage Fluted Stone Tool Bases: Further Evidence they are not Diagnostic of Clovis (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Goodson Rockshelter in Oklahoma has provided strong chronometric evidence that early- and middle-stage fluted stone tool bases found there date to the Late Archaic. These results further indicate that such specimens are not necessarily diagnostic of the Clovis culture. Here, we present additional evidence that early- and middle-stage fluted bases do not...
Ecological and Anthropogenetic Drivers of Artiodactyl Abundance and Distribution in Northeastern California: Implications for Social Signaling, Resource Intensification, and Resource Depression (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Variation in large-game hunting has long been viewed as a primary driver influencing many aspects of change in human behavior and biology worldwide. In western North America, variation in Holocene artiodactyl (e.g., bison, deer, pronghorn, bighorn sheep) hunting has often been examined from a behavioral ecological perspective to understand past...
ELCSA Assemblage Dataset (2022)
This paper briefly explores the archaeological signatures of Early through Late Holocene resource use and hunter-gatherer settlement patterns near Emerson Lake aboard the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center. Investigations of 156 localities along a linear belt of probable plant biomass modelled through Normalized Difference Vegetation Index assessments registered larger, richer, and more diverse assemblages, containing significantly higher frequencies of resource-processing artifacts, such as...
Excavations at 48CR103 Near Savery Creek, Carbon County, Wyoming (2012)
Data recovery excavations were conducted at 48CR103 in southern Carbon County, Wyoming. A single component was identified consisting of at least three features. Soil profiles from these excavations indicated a deflated dunal setting which experienced a high degree of erosion from extensive livestock grazing and extended drought conditions. While no radiometric datable material was recovered, lithic tools suggest a Middle to Late Plains Archaic Period of occupation. Artifacts and features show...
Exploring Occupation Patterns in the Lower Pecos and Central Texas Regions over the Last 9,000 Years using Radiocarbon Dates (2017)
We use summed probability distributions derived from radiocarbon sequences as a gross measure of prehistoric occupation patterns for two regions in Texas. The first sequence consists of over 325 dates from the Lower Pecos Region, located along the Rio Grande and Pecos Rivers. The region has over 40 years of radiocarbon dating, with dates in this database coming from multiple excavation projects that were frequently focused on shelters and cave. The second dataset comes from the Upper San Antonio...
Holocene climate change and human population growth rates (2016)
Statistical analysis of large databases of radiocarbon dates enables research on the processes regulating human population growth rates. Recent analysis of summed probability distributions of dates from the entire states of Colorado and Wyoming has found that both states had similar long-term growth rates of .04% for most of the Holocene. This growth rate was the same for Australia, Europe, and North America throughout much of the Holocene. Similar growth rates between different environments and...
Holocene seasonality, mobility, and diet at Niah Cave (Sarawak, East Malaysia): new isotope results on rainforest foragers and farmers? (2016)
Assessment of fine-grained proxies to infer paleoclimate and paleoecology in tropical Southeast Asia is hampered by the coarseness of the archaeological record. Advances in technology, however, do permit fresh insights into past rainforest ecologies using isotope ratios from tooth enamel, albeit with very real spatial and temporal limitations. This is especially true for isotopic analysis of incremental growth layers in human tooth enamel. In this paper, oxygen and carbon isotope ratios are...
Holocene Transformation of San Francisco Bay and Transbay Man Site Stratigraphy (2015)
San Francisco Bay was created by post-glacial sea-level rise during the span of prehistoric human occupation. The Bay is the single largest Pacific estuary in the Americas (4,160 square kilometers) and is the outlet for California’s largest freshwater drainage system that carries 40% of the state's runoff. The earliest known evidence of widespread human use of the estuary or tidal resources in the Bay Area first appears at shell midden sites located around the Bay in the middle Holocene...
Holocene transitions in highland Papua New Guinea: linking climate change to changes in subsistence and mobility with new models and data (2015)
Highland Papua New Guinea (PNG) is a region of independent invention of non-cereal-based agriculture. Consequently, the transition from a mobile lifestyle to a sedentary residential pattern, and the transition from a forager/gatherer subsistence practice to the adoption of agriculture by the past peoples of highland PNG have been a subject of considerable interest for archaeologists. Models of these transitions have changed through time with the arrival of new evidence such as palynological...
Holocene Vegetation Cycles, Land-use and Human Adaptations to Desertification in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia (2017)
Since the retreat of the Pleistocene some 11,700 years ago, the landscape and vegetation of the Mongolian Gobi Desert has been profoundly changing, punctuated by the appearance of lakes, wetlands, and finally aridification. Vegetation communities have responded to these changes according to temperature shifts and northward to southward movements of the edges of East Asian monsoonal systems. Human groups have lived, foraged, and traveled through the landscape of the Gobi for millennia, adapting...
Late Pleistocene and Holocene Abrupt Climate Change and Human Response in the Southeastern United States (2016)
As a result of the analysis of high-resolution global and regional paleoclimate records, we now know that our “stable” Holocene climate has been punctuated with periods of rapid and synchronous change, including rapid changes in temperature, available moisture, and vegetation. Far from being a period of climatic stability, recent studies suggest abrupt climate change during the Holocene including departures in temperature and precipitation with millennial-scale cyclicity that operates...
Looking into the Dark: Investigating Four Holocene Shelter Sites in Southwest Ethiopia (2015)
Preliminary excavations from the Gamo Ethnoarchaeological and Archaeological Research project in southwest Ethiopia include three caves and one rockshelter, located on the western escarpment of the Great Rift Valley. The analyses of these four mid-altitude (average 2135 meters) sites will add to our understanding of the cultural, ecological, and technological transitions occurring within the last 6000 years. The cave and rockshelter sites indicate the use of a classic Later Stone Age lithic...
Luis Alberto Borrero South-North Drift, Multiple Markers for the Archaeology of Tierra del Fuego and the Fueguian Archipelago (52º-56º S) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Patagonian Evolutionary Archaeology and Human Paleoecology: Commending the Legacy (Still in the Making) of Luis Alberto Borrero in the Interpretation of Hunter-Gatherer Studies of the Southern Cone" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The contributions and influence of Luis Borrero started with his early work at Tierra del Fuego and then surpassed multiple barriers –including the Strait of Magellan- as he developed an...
Paleosols and human activities in the lakebed area of Basin of Mexico during the Middle Holocene (2015)
During 2013 - 2014 archaeological research was undertaken in San Gregorio (Xochimilco) and Tepexpan, Basin of Mexico, to recover evidence for human activity associated to the preceramic period in the lakebed area of Chalco-Xochimilco and Texcoco. One of the specific objectives of this research is to characterize soil conditions north and south of modern Mexico City, during the early agriculture period (6500-4000 BP) by means of paleopedological analysis, and evaluate environmental and...