Caves and Rockshelters (Other Keyword)
76-100 (241 Records)
A plethora of ethnographic and archaeological evidence indicates a cross-cultural association of dark zones of caves with supernatural phenomena. In various geographic locations and time periods, human beings have been frequenting dark zones for ritual purposes. Regarding the unsuitable living conditions of dark zones, the following question arises: what drives humans to choose such places for practicing rituals? The answer to this question lies in the way human beings interact with dark cave...
Fast Fashion? Pelt Procurement in the Late Pleistocene at le Grand Abri aux Puces, France (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The origins of hominins using animal pelts as body covering, i.e. clothing, is an important adaptation to reconstruct. Throughout history, our hominin ancestors have adapted to living in temperate and glacial climates, as well as expanding into novel environments, like the Neanderthals in Europe over the past 300,000 years. However, there is currently no...
Fire or Stone? Applications of Infrared Spectroscopy and the Grinding Curve Procedure to Differentiate between Pyrogenic and Geogenic Calcites at Crvena Stijena Paleolithic Rock Shelter, Montenegro (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is becoming ever more clear that cooperative efforts amongst researchers trained in a wide variety of archaeological and geoarchaeological specialties during the planning, excavation, and interpretation of an archaeological site are crucial to a successful study. Middle Paleolithic deposits in Level XXIV of the rock shelter at Crvena Stijena, Montenegro are...
Following the Path of Dead in Chichen Itza through a Unique Modified Skull (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Subterranean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Terminal Classic and Postclassic periods, Chichen Itza became an important pilgrimage center. People from all over Mesoamerica came to the Maya Lowlands to make special offerings to Chichen Itza's sacred well. Paleoclimate studies indicate that a severe drought occurred during that period of time. This may have lasted a decade...
From Bayira, the Earliest African Genome, to a Place of Refuge: Mota Cave’s History in Southwestern Ethiopia (2018)
Mota Cave located in southwest Ethiopia was found in 2011 in collaboration with local Gamo elders and partially excavated in 2012. The cave has exposed a long sequence of occupation (5295 Cal BP to 305 BP) revealing remarkable technological, subsistence, and cultural changes. We uncovered a burial of a male with the earliest complete ancient genome recovered from the African continent. We have named him Bayira, meaning "first born" in the Gamo language where the cave is located. Bayira begins to...
From Bluffs to Floodplain: A Spatial Approach to Mississippian Communities in the Ozarks of Arkansas (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mississippian (ca. AD 1000–1500) occupation of the Ozarks in Northwest Arkansas is known through few multiple-mound ceremonial centers in river valleys and from rockshelters along limestone bluff lines. Few permanent habitation sites are recorded, and understanding how sites...
From Excavations to Occupations: Characterizing the Faunal Assemblage of a Late Woodland Site (2018)
Analysis of a faunal assemblage gives us direct evidence of a subsistence base of archaeological occupation. Woodpecker Cave is a Late Woodland rockshelter site used by the University of Iowa as a field school for student education. The site was first excavated by Warren W. Caldwell after his initial surveying in 1956. In the subsequent years since the university first began excavations in 2012 with Jim Enloe as supervisor, students have expanded the excavation area horizontally leading to...
From the Mousterian to the Bronze Age: The El Miron Cave Project (Cantabria, Spain), 1996-2018 (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Miron Cave has a long, rich cultural sequence dated by 92 radiocarbon assays >46,000-c.500 BP. This large, strategically located site contains traces of Mousterian, Gravettian, Azilian, Mesolithic and historic uses and evidence of more significant occupations of diverse duration, intensity and function throughout the Solutrean, Magdalenian, Neolithic,...
Geoarchaeological Approach to Resolving the Origins of Bison Bone Beds at Bonfire Shelter, 41VV218, Val Verde County, Texas (2021)
This is an abstract from the "The Big Bend Complex: Landscapes of History" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bonfire Shelter is a large prehistoric rockshelter site situated at the northern end of Mile Canyon in southwest Texas. Early investigators determined the site to be the location of multiple bison jump events; however, subsequent investigations have disputed this interpretation. My research focuses on answering the questions of whether the...
Geoarchaeological Approach to Resolving the Origins of Bison Bone Beds at Bonfire Shelter, 41VV218, Val Verde County, Texas (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Eagle Nest Canyon, Texas: Papers in Honor of Jack and Wilmuth Skiles" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bonfire Shelter is a large prehistoric rockshelter site situated at the northern end of Mile Canyon in southwest Texas. Early investigators determined the site to be the location of multiple bison jump events; however subsequent investigations have disputed this interpretation. My research focuses on...
Geoarchaeological Investigations at Bone Bed 1, Bonfire Shelter: Implications for Evidence of Early Paleoindian Site Use (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the summer of 2018, Texas State University returned to Bone Bed 1 at Bonfire Shelter, a stratified rockshelter in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Val Verde County, Texas. Excavations in 2017 and 2018 confirmed the presence of Pleistocene fauna in the potentially earlier than Clovis deposits of Bone Bed 1. However, evidence of cultural activity was limited to...
A Geoarchaeological Study of Site Formation Processes at Arma Veirana, A Palaeolithic Cave in Liguria, 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. Arma Veirana is a cave situated along the steep flanks of the Neva river valley, ca. 14 km from the modern-day Mediterranean coast in the mountainous interior of Liguria. The cave formed tectonically within marble, schist and other metamorphic rocks and presents a large but relatively short cavity. Excavations since...
Geoarchaeological Survey of the Irtysh River Basin, East Kazakhstan (2018)
Evidence for the earliest human occupation of Eastern Kazakhstan is poorly known, despite it being part one of the largest countries in the world and flanked along its borders with important paleoanthropological sites in Russia and China. We sought evidence of prehistoric sites by foot and vehicle survey around the Irtysh Basin. At each major point of interest we took photographs geotagged with geographic coordinates, and collected global positioning system (GPS) data. Although much of the area...
Geoarchaeology, the French Paleolithic, and Harold (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. Geoarchaeology requires the practitioner to be versed in both geology and archaeology. To do it right necessitates active participation of other specialists on the team, starting with the archaeologist(s). Without them, even the best geoarchaeological endeavors can fall flat. Both of us...
The Geography of Precontact Native American Rock Art in the American Southeast (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, a large number of precontact Native American rock art sites, including caves and open shelter localities, have been recorded in the southern Cumberland Plateau. Cave sites contain pictographs, petroglyphs, and mud glyphs. Most open sites are pictographs or petroglyphs painted or engraved into upland...
Geophysical Prospecting of the Teotihuacan Subsoil (2024)
This is an abstract from the "What Happened after the Fall of Teotihuacan?" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A geophysical study was carried out on the eastern flank of the Pyramid of the Sun to define the continuation of a tunnel discovered in 1974 under the western entrance of the pyramid. The investigation was carried out in the vicinity of Las Varillas cave, a structure excavated by settlers to obtain construction materials employed to build the...
Gruta do Gentio II: data on the new excavations and isotopic signals from the site (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Gruta do Gentio II is an iconic site in the archaeology of Central Brazil because of its early occupation and rich excavation history. Situated in the interfluvial region of the Central Plateau, renewed investigation (after 35 years) offers new perspectives for the site. Data produced during the 1970s and 1980s revealed a wide variety of remains dating...
Hands Stenciling: Men & Women as Healing Process? (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 checking of thousands of hands stencils from Borneo's caves and rockshelters, followed by the application of Manning's formula measuring at least the 2D/4D ratio, inasmuch as other world data from Africa and South America, witnessing the men and women presence, have led to the hypothesis of an healing process...
Harold Dibble’s Approach to Understanding the Middle Paleolithic Archaeological Record: Neanderthals outside the Box (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. Harold Dibble was one of the most prominent Paleolithic archaeologists of the last century researching the Middle Paleolithic of Eurasia. While he made significant contributions in a number of important areas, one of his main contributions was to encourage researchers to try to think...
Heavens on Earth: Cave Imagery and the Legacies of Mississippian Ceremonialism (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Art Style as a Communicative Tool in Archaeological Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cave art is amongst the earliest evidence of art in the North American Southeast, and was instrumental in establishing Early Mississippian period iconographic styles. Exploring the imagery found in caves across different cultural regions provides alternative contexts to understand distinct belief systems and ritual practices....
High-Altitude Adaptation in the Middle Palaeolithic of the Zagros Mountains, Iran: a view from Houmian (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intensification of fieldwork in the Zagros Mountains over the past two decades have provided crucial new insights into the region, revealing a much more complex patchwork of MP lithic industrial variability than hitherto appreciated. We present a series of new case studies on the high-altitude MP rockshelter of Houmian in the Iranian Zagros. Posited to be...
High-Resolution Microarchaeological Techniques for Understanding Depositional and Postdepositional Processes in Mugr-el Hamamah Cave (Jordan) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The rich archaeological record of the Mughr-el Hamamah (MHM) site in Jordan is key to understanding the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition in the Levant. However, important postdepositional processes due to pastoral activities during the twentieth century have affected the archaeological deposits and need to be taken into account. The archaeological...
How to Deal with Homogeneous Stratigraphies: Excavation, Sampling, and Analysis Strategies at Umhlatuzana Rockshelter, Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Developing Paleolithic Excavation Methods for the Twenty-First Century" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To ensure proper context control for archaeological samples, it is crucial that excavations determine and, where possible, follow the natural stratigraphic subdivisions in a sedimentary sequence. In cases with a single, unchanging source of sedimentary input, this may pose challenges. We present our strategies to...
The Human Presence in the Americas during and before the Late Glacial Maximum under the Light of New Investigations at Chiquihuite Cave, the Older-Than-Clovis Site in Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The 2016-2017 excavations at Chiquihuite Cave (northeastern Zacatecas, Mexico) produced solid evidence in favor of a sustained human occupation of the Northern Mexican Highlands during and before the Late Glacial Maximum (LGM) (in process of publication at the time of the submission of this abstract); an occupation that lasted for thousands of years in the...
Human-Environment Interactions and the Hunter-Gatherers of Chachapoyas, Peru (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Tropical Montane Cloud Forests" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although a growing bodies of scholarship address later cultural developments in such regions, Tropical Montane Cloud Forests (TMCF) are nevertheless perceived by many as environments marginal for human occupation, especially for hunter-gatherers. One such region, the Chachapoyas culture area in northern Peru, has to date been home to...