Paleoindian and Paleoamerican (Other Keyword)
1-25 (497 Records)
This is an abstract from the "New and Ongoing Research on the North American Plains and Rocky Mountains" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From 1999 to 2013, members of the Rocky Mountain Paleoindian Research Program (RMPRP) conducted extensive survey and numerous test excavations of very ancient sites in the Gunnison Basin, southwestern Colorado. During that period, researchers learned much about the timing of initial human use of the Basin and how...
A 3D Geometric Morphometric Comparison of Bone Surface Modifications on Proboscidean Assemblages from the Western Great Lakes (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Currently, an alarming number of plants and animals are on the brink of extinction due to habitat loss caused by human activities and climate change. Though numerically unprecedented, this may not be the first instance of a human-driven mass extinction. For decades, scholars have hypothesized that human predation led to the...
About Peopling and Rivers: Connections and Boundaries in the Early Peopling of Eastern South America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Several papers have discussed the role of rivers in the process of knowledge, occupation, and dispersion of human groups in unfamiliar or inhabited landscapes. Most of the time the rivers are seen as displacement axes, facilitating the connection between distant points in a short time. However, at the same time as connecting elements, rivers can play the role...
Adding to the Paleoenvironmental Framework for Early Settlement of Interior Alaska: New Perspectives on Local Changes in Vegetation and Hydrology from Plant Wax N-Alkanes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of Alaska, the Gateway to the Americas" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many paleoenvironmental reconstructions from interior Alaska are based on pollen assemblages from lacustrine cores, which are sometimes challenging to relate directly to terrestrial conditions experienced by early human occupants. Here we use compound-specific stable isotope analysis of plant wax n-alkanes (δ13C wax and δDwax values) to...
Addressing Taphonomic Complications in the Use of Archaeological Radiocarbon Assemblages as Population Proxies: A Case Study in the Bonneville Basin (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. One of the imperatives driving reconstructions of past demography is the desire to analyze the impacts of past climate changes on human populations. An increasingly popular tool is the analysis of archaeological radiocarbon record, but the very paleoclimate changes that are of interest also have geomorphic effects—and the...
Advanced AMS 14C Dating of Contaminated Bones Associated with North American Clovis and Pre-Clovis Butchering Sites (2018)
When humans first colonized the Americas is becoming better understood by the addition of aDNA studies; however, the absolute dating of these late Pleistocene sites is crucial and depends upon accurate 14C dating of the fossils (i.e. bones, teeth and ivory). We re-dated vertebrate fossils associated with the North American butchering sites Wally’s Beach (Canada), La Prele, also known as Fetterman (Wyoming), Lindsay (Montana) and Dent (Colorado). Our work demonstrates the crucial importance of...
Aerial Mapping Approaches for Long-Term Monitoring of Heritage Landscapes Impacted by Climate Change (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is a strong need to document heritage landscapes impacted due to rapidly changing climates in Canada. This paper presents two case studies about using UAV-based technology to better understand landscapes impacted by climate change. Both examples use UAV photogrammetric methods to monitor large and complex archaeological heritage sites. The first case...
After the Ice Age in the Ozarks (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fluted point techno-complexes of the Ozarks include Clovis, Gainey, Folsom, and Dalton. Folsom point-making people are comparatively less well represented in the interior Ozarks possibly because of the lack of grasslands and bison. In this presentation, we explain the origins and evolution of Clovis technology and the exploitation of lithic resources from...
An Agate Basin Point from Michoacán, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Late Pleistocene Stemmed Points across North America: Continental Questions and Regional Concerns" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A complete black obsidian Agate Basin Point was found in a rockshelter in the state of Michoacán, Mexico, during the excavations realized by the CEMCA team. Despite the fact that the stratigraphy of the shelter had been completely disturbed, this point was found associated with a complete...
The Ages of Stemmed and Fluted Points in the Northwestern Plains and Rocky Mountains (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Perspectives on the Western Stemmed Tradition-Clovis Debate in the Far West" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While the relative and absolute ages of fluted and stemmed points remain unclear in the Great Basin, particularly in the earliest periods of prehistory, to the northeast in Wyoming the archaeological record is unambiguous. Fluted points are consistently older than stemmed points, an observation supported...
Allometry, Modularity, and Integration: Applying Biological Concepts and Statistical Tests to Stone Tool Shapes (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Geometric Morphometrics in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most landmark-based geometric morphometric statistical analyses of stone tools are lifted from biological applications. The concepts are not always directly applicable, leading to unfounded interpretations of statistical results. Sometimes the problem is an imprecise definition of terms, but often the problem is an imperfect translation of a...
Amazonian Palm and Tree Fruits Fed Residents during the Pleistocene–Holocene Transition (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Thirty years after its first excavations, Caverna da Pedra Pintada continues to be one of the only sites in the Brazilian Amazon that dates to the Pleistocene–Holocene transition (over 12,000 cal BP). As such, understanding this site is pivotal to the interpretation of early human occupations and transformations of the tropical forest. Archaeobotanical...
Analysis of the Faunal Distribution at the Weed Lake Ditch site (35HA341), Southeastern Oregon (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Weed Lake Ditch is an open-air site located on the relict shores of Pluvial Lake Malheur in the Harney Basin of southeastern Oregon. Excavations by the University of Nevada, Reno and the Center for the Study of the First Americans (CSFA) have revealed multiple stemmed points and crescent lithic technology in buried contexts. Faunal remains from the site are...
Analysis of Western Stemmed Tradition Stone Tool Patterns and Faunal Remains from Pit Feature 95 at the Cooper’s Ferry Site (10IH73), Idaho (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology from Western North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Investigations at the Cooper’s Ferry site (10IH73) reveal unique insights about the Western Stemmed Tradition (WST). Previous studies at the site presented information on WST pit cache features; here specifically, I present a study of Feature 95 (F95), which provides an archaeological snapshot of site occupation at ~9679 ± 33 BP (11,190–11,093 cal...
Ancient Landscapes of the Rocky Mountain Front: A View from the Billy Big Springs Site, MT (2018)
The northern Rocky Mountain Front contains critical information regarding human exploration and colonization of the continent. Yet, reconstructed paleo-landscapes in the region extending from southern Alberta to northern Montana have focused almost exclusively on the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. Billy Big Springs, a multi-component site located just east of East Glacier Park, provides new data on long-term natural (as old as 21,000 cal. BP) and cultural (post 14,000 to 700 cal. BP) landscape...
Anthropology Underwater: Landscape archaeology above and below water in the Great Lakes (2018)
Submerged prehistoric landscapes have unique traits which make them invaluable to archaeologists – increased preservation of organic remains, Pompeii-like snap shots in time, and data that either do not exist on land or are deeply buried. These attributes make the few challenges that remain for conducting archaeology underwater more than worth the effort. Early human occupation in the Great Lakes has been difficult to investigate as acidic soils and dynamic water levels left many archaeological...
An Application of Surovell’s Behavioral Ecology Models of Site Occupation Length in the Peruvian Andes (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In his monograph, Toward a Behavioral Ecology of Lithic Technology (2009), Todd Surovell models mathematically the economics of prehistoric hunter-gatherers’ production, use, and discard of lithic technologies. Although we see great potential in these models to extend our understanding of hunter-gatherer mobility patterns and landscape use, they have received...
The Archaeofaunal Dimension of Preceramic Human-Environment Dynamics in the Highlands of Southwestern Honduras (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of the Preceramic period (ca. 11,000–5,000 cal BP) in Mesoamerica has focused on the transition from a foraging way of life toward agriculture, plant domestication, and sedentism. Yet we know little about the processes and contexts that drove this transition, particularly the relationship between foragers and animal prey. In this paper I present...
Archaeological Evidence of Human Hunting and North American Megafauna Extinctions: A Statistical Reassessment of the Fenske Bone Surface Modifications (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists continue to debate what caused the mass extinction of North American megafauna at the end of the Pleistocene—human hunting, climate change, or a combination of both. This debate persists because archaeologists lack standardized methodologies to relate unobservable human hunting behaviors with fossilized animal remains. Some...
Archaeological GIS Approaches to a Regional Analysis in São Paulo State, Southeastern Brazil (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Being a science that intends to understand the past through artifacts, Archaeology tends to make inferences about human behavior assessing historical events with reference with time and space. Considering that the results of archaeological studies are rich in spatial information, the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) seems to be an excellent...
Archaeological Investigations at the Double Flute Folsom site (LA178142), New Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Paleoindian Southwest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In May 2017, the QUEST Archaeological Research Program (SMU) investigated the Double Flute Folsom site (LA178142) in Socorro County, New Mexico. Intensive surface survey and excavations were performed to determine the nature and extent of Folsom activities, the stratigraphic integrity of archaeological deposits, and their paleoenvironmental context. The site...
Archaeological Open Air Hunter-Gatherer Sites in the Serranopolis Region, Brazil: An Interpretation of the Landscape (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological region of Serranópolis in Southestern Goias/Brazil stands out for its cultural material in rock shelter sites occupied by groups of hunter-gatheres and agricultural ceramists from 10,400 B.P to 915 B.P. The purpose of this paper is to verify the low frequency and visibility of open air sites, applying variables such as landscape, geology,...
Archaeological Recovery of Late Pleistocene Hair and Environmental DNA from Interior Alaska (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of Alaska, the Gateway to the Americas" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient hair and remnant plant DNA are important environmental proxies that preserve for millennia in specific archaeological contexts. However, recovery has been rare from late Pleistocene sites and more may be found if deliberately sought. Once discovered, singular hair fragments are not easily identified to taxa through comparative...
The Archaeology of Shuká Káa Cave: Final Report (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Shuká Káa Cave, is located on an island in the homeland of the Tlingit and Haida people of Southeast Alaska, and records seven episodes of human activity dating between 12,170 and 1200 cal BP. Three periods of occupation (10,600–10,150, 9930–9450, and 8360–7929 cal BP) contain microblades, bifaces, and expedient tools. The discovery of 10,500 cal BP human...
Architecture and Human Behavior at a Folsom Period Residential Camp (2019)
This is an abstract from the "More Than Shelter from the Storm: Hunter-Gatherer Houses and the Built Environment" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mountaineer Folsom site, located in the Southern Rocky Mountains of Colorado, USA, contains evidence of at least four substantial habitation structures occupied over the course of at least one winter residence. The structures required significant energetic investment in their construction and were...