Early Stone Age (Other Keyword)
1-8 (8 Records)
The Early Stone Age record is a spatially continuous palimpsest representing thousands of years of artifact discard. The record thus reflects a long-term pattern of hominin movement at a landscape scale. Despite this, most recent research continues to employ interpretive perspectives suited for finer temporal grains and relies on targeted excavation of dense concentrations of artifacts. Here ‘sites’ are investigated as discrete functionally organized places and analytically interpreted based on...
Dating the Early Stone Age site of Isimila, Tanzania. (2015)
The Early Stone Age (ESA) site of Isimila is located on the Iringa plateau, Tanzania, close to the East African Rift Valley. Due to the abundance of handaxes present at the site in both primary and secondary contexts, Isimila has long been recognised as a key site of international importance for understanding the behavioural complexity of our hominin ancestors often compared alongside major East African e.g. Kalambo Falls, Olduvai Gorge and Olorgesailie (Kleindienst and Keller 1976; Mcbrearty...
Early Stone Age hominin habitat preferences: predictions from a modern taphonomic and ecological study in Kenya (2017)
Two key resources that would have conditioned hominin behavior and habitat preferences in the Early Stone Age of Africa are food and water. This talk presents an examination of spatial relationships of these resources from a modern taphonomic and ecological study of large mammal carcasses at Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Kenya. The locations of fresh carnivore kills and older bone scatters that still retained within-bone nutrients (marrow and brains) are examined to determine whether these dietary...
Finding the Cognitive Neurocognitive Core of Paleolithic Stoneknapping: an ALE meta-analysis (2015)
Pioneering neuroimaging studies have allowed the analysis of the cognitive basis of stoneknapping and lithic technology to develop rapidly over the past 40 years. While these studies have helped identify the neuroanatomy of stoneknapping, interpretation of the cognitive significance of these results is still in its early days. To provide a comparative baseline between brain activity in stoneknapping and the rest of cognitive neuroscience, I performed an Activation Likelihood Estimate (ALE)...
Identifying fire in Early Stone Age: A study of site FxJj20 AB, Koobi Fora, Kenya (2016)
Fire use by human ancestors may explain changes seen in Homo erectus and be responsible for the development of later human species. Anthropogenic fire claims in the Early Stone Age (ESA) are disputed because many of these sites are in secondary deposits and contain no association between human behavior and fire evidence. Careful excavation producing high-resolution spatial data, detailed micromorphological analysis, Fourier transform infrared spectrometry (FTIR), and high-resolution spatial...
Paleolithic Survey on the Upper Luangwa Valley, Zambia (2017)
The northern half of the Luangwa Valley, Zambia, a southern branch of the East African rift system, is archaeologically unexplored territory in an area that may have served as an important biogeographic corridor between eastern and southern Africa during the Plio-Pleistocene. This paper summarizes the first systematic survey in this region. Paleontological reconnaissance in 2013 incidentally revealed multiple Paleolithic sites which may range from the Acheulian through the MSA. Representative...
Patterns of Hominin Land Use and Raw Material Procurement in the Paleo-Olduvai Basin, Tanzania (2017)
Suitable toolstone was a key affordance for Early Stone Age (ESA) populations across Africa. Northern Tanzania’s Olduvai Basin, because it contains numerous ESA archaeological localities and a variety of quartzitic outcrops, offers an excellent opportunity to evaluate the effect of raw material distribution on hominin landuse. While the lithology and mineralogy of these outcrops have been well described, their macroscopic similarities confound efforts to reliably determine the exact source of...
Thermal Curve Fracture (TCF) as a diagnostic tool for the identification of anthropogenic fire (2015)
Recognizing fire evidence in the record can be challenging and contentious. Aside from baked earth features – hearths, daub, etc. – a widely reported associated artifact is fire-cracked rock (FCR). Unlike flaked stone assemblages, FCR lacks a standardized description, criteria, test or model; archaeologists often learn identification ‘in the field.’ Recent actualistic studies have demonstrated that a previously undescribed type of FCR has likely been unknowingly lumped with other ‘angular...