Paleoindian and Paleoamerican (Other Keyword)
26-50 (497 Records)
Rapidly evolving modern technology has resulted in powerful tools for preserving and visualizing archaeological materials. Extensively recording a site with digital technologies enables new explorations of site discovery and recovery processes while concurrently providing a permanent, detailed record of the material. Here, Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene maritime sites in coastal Peru are reconstructed at various scales. Drone photography and GIS are utilized to collect high-resolution...
Arlington Springs Chronostratigraphy and Implications for Early Human Settlement along North America's Pacific Coast (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What may be the earliest dated human skeletal remains so far discovered in North America come from the Arlington Springs Site on Santa Rosa Island, California. To corroborate the 13,077-12,656 2-sigma cal BP age of this ancient Native American, stratigraphic investigations were undertaken to place this discovery in its chronological and paleoenvironmental...
Assessing Biface Reduction and the Ideal Use-life of Fluted Bifaces (2018)
Various methods have been developed to assess the use-life of Paleoindian bifaces by focusing on morphological attributes. Comparative studies have often proven difficult in part because of the diverse nature of Paleoindian biface technologies in North America. While morphological ratios such as length-to-width vary considerably throughout biface use-lives, technological ratios related to fluting and lateral grinding typically remain more constant. In turn, technological variables may be more...
Assessing Continuity and Change in Paleoindian Landscape use through Time in Indiana: Implications for site Predictive Modeling (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Geoarchaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recent completion of the Indiana State Historic Preservation Office’s SHAARD database provides researchers with a comprehensive site archive that includes site locations, projectile point typologies, raw material types, and a marginal record of site details. We use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to analyze the distribution of over six hundred Early, Middle, and...
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...
Assessing the Chronological Variation Within the Western Stemmed Tradition (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. Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) projectile points exhibit considerable morphological variability, which may reflect difference in function, ethnolinguistic affiliation, resharpening/rejuvenation, or age. These ideas represent hypotheses that remain to be tested, and rejecting one or more of them will...
Assessing the Potential for a Late Pleistocene–Early Holocene Occupation at the Tahkenitch Landing Site (35DO130), Siuslaw National Forest, Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology from Western North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While archaeologists hypothesize that early peoples initially migrated into the Americas along the Pacific coast, environmental changes associated with postglacial sea-level rise may have destroyed or obscured such early sites. In coastal areas currently above sea level, early sites are difficult to find due to terrestrial processes of landscape...
Assessing Variability in Toolkit Functionality: Differential Wear Patterns on Projectile Technologies from Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene Interior Alaska (2018)
Much of the early theoretical framework for our understanding of the colonization and occupation of interior Alaska has been established on technological variability in lithic assemblages of the region. This initial research has been limited in scope, focusing on the presence or absence of microblades. Recent research has sought to push beyond the significance of debatably diagnostic tool forms, microblades, in defining cultural complexes and has attempted to more fully address models of...
Assessment of Late Quaternary Bison Diminution Using Linear Discriminant Analysis (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The proximate cause of reduction in the overall size of late Quaternary bison is the focus of continued debate. Some researchers contend that size reduction did not occur despite well-documented changes in climate and vegetation, while others link directional change in body size to changes in forage quality and availability or human predation. Historically,...
At What Expense? An Expended Utility Study of Bolen Projectile Points in Northern Florida (2019)
This is an abstract from the "First Floridians to La Florida: Recent FSU Investigations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Schott and Ballenger’s (2007) work analyzing the expended utility of Dalton bifaces looked at the difference between the potential utility of an artifact and its residual utility to understand the use-wear and resharpening processes that shaped the artifact, and applied their findings to reconstructing the population-level use of...
Bayesian Analysis of Radiocarbon Assays from the Late Paleoindian Sentinel Gap Site (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bayesian analysis of eight calibrated radiocarbon dates from the Sentinel Gap site (central Washington) are presented. Application of a Bayesian framework provides a method of reassessing uncertainty in the age-range provided by this suite of assays. The Bayesian chronology generated through this analysis establishes a higher resolution temporal placement for...
The Benefits and Challenges of Active Excavations as Tools for Interpretation and Public Outreach: Examples from Blackwater Draw Locality 1 (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Touching the Past: Public Archaeology Engagement through Existing Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Blackwater Draw Locality 1 is one of few archaeological sites in North America open to the public with exposed cultural deposits on permanent display and protected by an enclosed structure. With deposits spanning the last 13,000 years, the locality provides a unique opportunity to interpret in situ past human...
Beringia Underwater: The Search for New Archaeological Sites on the Pacific Northwest Coast (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Global Submerged Paleolandscapes Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When and how people first arrived in the Americas remains one of archaeology’s greatest mysteries. The earliest archaeological evidence suggests that people migrated from Siberia across the Bering Strait, Beringia, and into Alaska around 14,000 years ago. Where they went from there is still unclear! One hypothesis is that these First...
Beringian Landscapes and Human Responses in the Middle Tanana Valley, Alaska (2018)
The middle Tanana Valley of interior Alaska, an unglaciated region of Eastern Beringia, holds a high-resolution record of human-environment interaction that extends over 14,000 years. The Late Glacial and early Holocene landscapes of this region were dynamic with considerable ecological restructuring. Aeolian deposits accumulated in lowland areas and adjacent foothills at relatively high rates, soils were relatively underdeveloped, river down-cutting prevailed across the valley, and wild fires...
The Best Defense is a Good Offense: Culturally Affiliating the Ancient One by Following the Law (2018)
The 20 year journey to repatriation of the Ancient One was long, arduous, frustrating, eye opening, and an education in the NAGPRA law. Over the years we have discovered how poorly understood the law can be. In the case of the Ancient One, the ownership or control of his remains falls under Section 3 of NAGPRA for inadvertent discoveries on federal lands after 1990. An overview of the evidentiary standard applicable to cultural affiliation determinations under NAGPRA will be presented. All...
Beyond a Stone’s Throw from the Lithic Source: New Investigations of the Paleoindian Component at the Templeton Site in Western Connecticut (2018)
2017 marks the 40th anniversary of Roger Moeller’s initial excavation of Templeton, the first Paleoindian site systematically studied in Connecticut. New excavations at Templeton were conducted in 2016 and 2017 to further document the Paleoindian component of the site. This presentation reports on the results of the new excavations and the reanalysis of the Paleoindian materials recovered Moeller.
Beyond Paleoarchaic Lithic Procurement at the Bear Creek Site (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Second-Oldest Sites in the Pacific Northwest" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. More than 3,600 chipped stone artifacts were recovered from the Bear Creek site in Redmond, Washington, primarily from a context dating to ca. 12,500–10,000 cal BP. Projectile point styles include unfluted lanceolate and Western Stemmed Tradition points. The site was excavated as part of a cultural resources management project in 2009 and...
Bifacial Technology in Central-South Patagonia: A Preliminary Insight into Hunter-Gatherer Behavior during the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition and Early Holocene in the Deseado Massif and Nearby Spaces (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bifaces can be useful in different kinds of situations. For example, they can be part of a curated strategy for peopling of new environments, as well as during their colonization. The knowledge of their distribution around the landscape, taking into account raw materials involved as well as their manufacturing stages and discard causes, compared with lithics...
Black and Blue, Red and Yellow: Clovis Exploitation of a Central New Mexico Lithic Source (2018)
Along the western edge of the Rio Grande Valley in Central New Mexico is a huge expanse of late Cenozoic volcanics, including a high-quality hydrothermally altered rhyolite. Colloquially known as Socorro jasper, at least one source of this material was exploited frequently by Clovis groups. This paper describes this source—the Black Canyon quarry—and the physical and geochemical properties of the "jasper" from it. Recent and continuing studies of its use by Clovis groups are reviewed, and its...
The Black Rock Site: It's Not Just Paleoindian Rock Art (2021)
This is an abstract from the "From the Plains to the Plateau: Papers in Honor of James D. Keyser" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Black Rock is an extremely rare, fully pecked rock art site in southwestern Wyoming. It is dominated by unusual anthropomorphic forms and associated abstract/geometric designs, with three identifiable zoomorphic figures (two mountain sheep and one elk). As part of a 1990s dating study, 14C and rock varnish...
Blackwater Draw: Turning Student Research into Public Outreach (2018)
Blackwater Draw is known world-wide as the type-site for Clovis culture— the first demonstrable evidence of humans hunting mammoths in the New World. However, as a resource of Eastern New Mexico University, Blackwater Draw is also a valuable tool for creating connections between student research and community engagement. Students participate in internships, directed studies, and use the varied components of the site to write their undergraduate capstone papers and graduate theses. Through these...
Bloody Sharp Rocks: Optimization of aDNA Extraction from Experimental Lithic Artifacts (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Species detection using DNA recovered from lithic artifacts could indicate the manner in which tools were utilized and ultimately enhance our understanding of the mobility strategies and subsistence patterns employed by past peoples. Geneticists and archaeologists in the 1980s and 1990s managed to successfully extract DNA from lithics, using both modern...
Blue Canyon, a Clovis Quarry/Workshop and Camp in Central New Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Opportunities to learn more about Clovis technological behavior at lithic material procurement and workshop sites are rare, particularly in the Southwest. The Blue Canyon site is a rare example of such a site—an artifact scatter covering some 16,000 m2 and consisting of Clovis projectile points and preforms, end scrapers, bifaces, and lithic debitage...
Bluefish Caves Revisited: Testing a Potential Pre-Clovis Site in Eastern Beringia (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. Originally excavated by Jacques Cinq-Mars in the 1970s and 1980s, Bluefish Caves, Yukon Territory, yielded artifacts and faunal remains. Cinq-Mars’s chronology for human occupation at the site dates to as early as ca. 24 ka and has been corroborated by AMS 14C-dated cut-marked bones. These findings support the genetic “Beringian...
Bonfire Shelter: A Zooarchaeological Reevaluation of Bone Bed 2 (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 rockshelter in Eagle Nest Canyon, a short tributary of the Rio Grande in West Texas, that contains three distinct bone beds of varying ages. The middle bone bed, Bone Bed 2, is a Paleoindian-aged deposit dating to ~12,000 years BP. Bone Bed 2 was originally interpreted as the remains of one or more bison mass kills;...