Paleoindian and Paleoamerican (Other Keyword)
201-225 (497 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Future Directions for Archaeology and Heritage Research in the Willamette Valley, Oregon" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Inland flood-control reservoirs represent a novel analog for studying submerged terrestrial landscapes. The same scale and time-independent processes that impact coastal environments through sea-level changes are also produced through a reservoir’s annual draft and fill cycles. Within these...
Holocene Occupations of the Blair Lakes Archaeological District (2021)
This is an abstract from the "McDonald Creek and Blair Lakes: Late Pleistocene-Holocene Human Activity in the Tanana Flats of Central Alaska" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Tanana Basin of interior Alaska is at the center of efforts to identify late Pleistocene and Holocene archaeological sites that better define regional occupation histories and provide insight into subarctic adaptation, technological organization, assemblage variability,...
Household Size and Organization at the Tenant Swamp Paleoindian Site (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Hearth and Home in the Indigenous Northeast" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Four well-defined Paleoindian house floors radiocarbon dated to 12,600 BP were excavated at the Tenant Swamp site in Keene, New Hampshire. Believed to be a winter occupation during the Younger Dryas, these dwellings were oval in shape and organized in defined zones with a central hearth, a defined work area, and an “empty” space along the...
How Much Force Does It Take to Break a Flaked Stone Tool? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Endscrapers are a common flaked stone tool found at Late Pleistocene sites around the world. Microwear evidence has demonstrated that these implements are predominantly used for hide-scraping. However, these small, round, often bullet-like specimens are also found broken. Here, using controlled and actualistic experiments we explore the forces necessary to...
Huayacocotla’s Early Holocene and Middle Archaic Human Occupations (2018)
The Hunter-gatherer Phase in Veracruz and Mexico project has studied the Huayacocotla region, located in the state's northern highlands. Until a few years ago the richness of evidence that these archaeological sites contain were unknown and today they make up part of the little we know about the state's earliest people. Here we review the relative chronology and different occupations for the Early Holocene and Middle Archaic sites by interpreting the alteration, refunctionalization and...
Human Induced Percussion Technology: A Synthesis of Bone Modification as Archaeological Evidence (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Animal bone modification by humans has long been part of the archaeological record; however, debate continues as to whether this evidence alone is sufficient to interpret human activity. This is especially true if such evidence is used in support of archaeological sites older than 16 ka in the Americas. We synthesize data representing over three decades of...
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-Induced Percussion Technology: A Synthesis of Bone Modification as Archaeological Evidence (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Prey animal bone modification by humans has long been part of the archaeological record; however, debate continues as to whether this evidence alone is sufficient to justify interpretation of technological activity. This is especially true if such evidence is used in support of archaeological sites older than 16 kya in the Americas. This poster synthesizes...
Hunter-Gatherer Fission-Fusion in Ethnographic and Archaeological Records: From the Mbuti to Paleoindians (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ephemeral Aggregated Settlements: Fluidity, Failure or Resilience?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology views hunter-gatherers as nature’s children or launching pads to complex society. Ethnographic hunter-gatherers exhibit fission-fusion cycles that we explain variously, including modular organization of group sizes (e.g., "scalar-stress"). However well models explain ethnographic pattern, archaeological tests...
The Hunters Were Here First: Paleoindian Research in the Greater Southwest (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Paleoindian Southwest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In attempting to work out the chronological relationship between a newly discovered mammoth kill and plant processing sites in southern Arizona in the 1950s, Emil Haury succinctly concluded, "the hunters were here first." In the ensuing decades, it became clear that underlying the relatively conspicuous archaeological record of the agricultural Southwest is an...
Identification of Fragmented Mammoth Ivory in Archaeological Sites Using SEM Microscopy (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although mammoth ivory appears distinctive from other organic materials when found in large pieces, many morphological characteristics that distinguish ivory – such as Schreger lines – cannot be easily identified in small fragments. However, other characteristics, including dental tubules and canals, can be microscopically identified. In this study, I...
Identifying Lithic Technological Strategies at the Late Paleoindian Sentinel Gap Site Using 3D Digital Morphometrics (2018)
The Late Paleoindian Sentinel Gap site, located along the Columbia River in central Washington, provides a unique data set of bifaces and projectile points/knives (pp/ks) from a single occupation episode dating to c. 10,200 radiocarbon years BP. In addition to over 60 partial and complete bifaces and 11 pp/ks recovered during excavations, 15 lithic debris accumulations interpreted as debitage "dumps" were excavated. The refitting of flakes from one of these features revealed the original core...
Innovative GIS Mapping Approaches Further Support Historic Site, Etzanoa, Was Located at the Mouth of the Walnut River, Arkansas City, Kansas (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This analysis presents convincing evidence that the mythic city of Etzanoa locale can be confirmed as located at the mouth of the Walnut River, in Arkansas City as proposed by Dr. Donald Blakeslee in 2018. Satellite imagery, ESRI’s GIS technologies, georeferencing, and comparative viewshed analyses conducted in geospatial environments offer new and innovative...
An Interdisciplinary Approach to Investigate Early Andean Settlement Dynamics and Adaptation (2018)
The Andean cordillera was one of the world’s last mountain regions to be colonized by hunter-gatherers. To date, the empirical evidence indicates an initial appearance of humans in the high Andes (up to 4500 m above sea level) in the Terminal Pleistocene, about 12,500 years ago. Early forager sites of the Andes exhibit a spectrum of settlement and mobility configurations, which constitute responses to the structure of resources in their specific habitats. Intriguingly, some of the earliest and...
Interdisciplinary Studies at Delta River Overlook Site, a Late Pleistocene to Late Holocene Multicomponent Site in Central Alaska (2018)
Recent large-scale excavations at Delta River Overlook in the middle Tanana River basin yielded 12 components dating from the onset of the Younger Dryas (~12,860 cal BP) to the later Holocene (2300 cal yr BP). Well preserved faunal assemblages, including bison, are present in multiple components, with economic transitions evident at ~6000 cal yr BP. Several features and activity areas were analyzed, including ochre-rich processing areas. Over 20,000 lithic items have been analyzed, primarily...
Interpreting Resharpening Patterns of Paleoindian and Early Archaic Projectile Points from the Carolina Piedmont (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Resharpening occurs throughout the use-life of a tool and may indicate the intention to rejuvenate the blade edge or the reconfiguration of a tool for a new function. Analysis of this aspect of projectile point maintenance can reflect variation in resource use strategies amongst the users of these tools. This study concerns the differences in resharpening...
Interpreting Technological Activities and Organization at McDonald Creek, Central Alaska, ca. 13,900 Calendar Years Ago (2021)
This is an abstract from the "McDonald Creek and Blair Lakes: Late Pleistocene-Holocene Human Activity in the Tanana Flats of Central Alaska" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Continuing excavations at the McDonald Creek site, located in the Tanana Flats south of the city of Fairbanks, have yielded a significant assemblage of stone artifacts. Most of these come from a late Pleistocene cultural layer dating to about 13,900 calendar years ago, but...
Intrasite Spatial Analysis at the Debra L. Friedkin Site, TX (2018)
The Debra L. Friedkin site, located in central Texas along Buttermilk Creek, provides evidence of human occupation in Texas during the past 15 thousand years within a deposit approximately 1 meter thick. Excavation Block A consisted of 52 contiguous 1x1 m units excavated between 2006 and 2009. Excavations since the initial publication of the site include 14 units adjacent to the south end of the block and 32 units just northeast. Each 1x1 m unit was excavated in 2.5 cm levels. Currently we are...
Introduction to Session with a Discussion of Measuring Stone Tool Diversity (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It has been thirty years since the publication of Quantifying Diversity in Archaeology and this edited volume has proven to be an important benchmark in archaeological diversity studies. We review the impact this volume has had on quantitative archaeological research across a number of subfields. We then provide three examples of our work...
Investigating the Cody Complex at the Capshaw site, a Late Paleoindian site in Texas (2018)
This paper presents the results of an investigation conducted at the Capshaw site, a lithic scatter site, located within the Southern High Plains region in the panhandle of Texas. The Southern High Plains region is well-known for its rich archaeological record of Paleoindian peoples, however the Cody period remains relatively poorly understood. The paper will first describe the history of the site from its discovery in 2013 through archaeological surveys with explorative field school excavations...
Investigating the Morphological Variation of Endthinning Scars on Paleoindian Bifacial Projectile Point Morphologies Using Geometric Morphometrics (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Geometric Morphometrics in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Endthinning, the removal of longitudinal flakes from the base of a biface, is a key diagnostic flaking characteristic of Clovis, Gainey, Folsom, Cumberland, and other Early and Middle Paleoindian biface and projectile point technologies. In the Late Paleoindian Dalton tradition in the eastern United States, endthinning occurs less consistently on...
Investigating the Population History of Western North America: Implications for the Peopling of the New World (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Western North America has emerged as a key region of focus in studies addressing the migration routes and demographic processes involved in the peopling of the Americas. Archaeological investigations in this region have resulted in the discovery of several of the earliest human skeletons and archaeological sites on the North American continent. Given that this...
Investigations at Half Mile Rise Sink (8TA98): A Submerged Paleoindian Site in Northwest Florida (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Half Mile Rise Sink (8TA98) is located within the Half Mile Rise portion of the Aucilla River in Northwest Florida. This site offers vital clues on Paleoindian lifeways of peoples occupying the Big Bend region of Florida. Here, Paleoindian projectile points and other lithics, faunal remains, and bone tools were recovered during previous investigations from a...
Investigations of the Late Pleistocene occupations at Holzman, Shaw Creek, Interior Alaska (2018)
The Holzman site, discovered in 2015, is roughly one half mile from the confluence of Shaw Creek with the Tanana River in interior Alaska. To date, we have excavated 56m2, revealing repeated occupations beginning in the Bolling-Allerod, and including an occupation in the Younger Dryas. Located near the Broken Mammoth, Mead, and Swan Point late Pleistocene sites, Holzman consists of a local stone flaking station, hearths, and thousands of faunal remains including organic implements on mammoth...
Is Fluting Exclusive to Paleoindians? A Comparison of Paleoindian and Archaic End-Thinning Techniques (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The idea that fluting is a uniquely Paleoindian technological marker for projectile points in the Americas has been considered a given ever since the original Folsom discovery in 1927. While it is true that fluted lanceolate points are reliably diagnostic artifacts of the Paleoindian period, stemmed points from the Archaic period also occasionally exhibit end...