Paleoindian and Paleoamerican (Other Keyword)
476-500 (596 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beringia is central (both physically and theoretically) to most out-of-Asia theories for how humans first came to the Americas. Understanding the chronology of the peopling of the Americas is complicated by the fact that roughly two million km2 of Beringia (an area larger than the modern US state of Alaska) was submerged over the course of the late...
Searching for the Early Archaeological Record in the Big Bend Region of Southwest Texas: A Lithostratigraphic Approach (2023)
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the 1930s and 1940s, Kirk Bryan and Claude C. Albritton Jr. studied the stratigraphy of late Quaternary alluvial fills in the Chihuahuan Desert of the Big Bend region, southwest Texas. A significant outcome of that work was the recognition of three stratigraphic units that were differentiated based on...
Searching Oregon’s Outer Continental Shelf for Submerged First Americans Sites: Theory, Methods, and Recent Discoveries (2018)
If the First Americans initially migrated into the New World from northeastern Asia along a coastal route, we should expect to find the earliest evidence of human occupation in the Americas in submerged sites along the northeastern Pacific Rim. Late Pleistocene-aged human coastal migrants would undoubtedly exploit high ecological productivity zones of ancient estuaries and bays that once existed along paleocoastal landscapes. A systematic approach to the discovery of First Americans coastal...
Sedimentary and Taphonomic Contexts of Quaternary Vertebrate Fossils in the Northern Rocky Mountains (2018)
Quaternary vertebrate assemblages from the northern Rocky Mountains can be used to understand the biogeographic consequences of climate change. Some localities contain strata from before the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), while others consist mostly of Late Glacial and Holocene deposits. The Merrell Local Fauna is from a stratigraphic sequence in Centennial Valley. Radiocarbon dates range from >52,000 to 19,000 BP and fossils are in lacustrine deposits, fluvial sediments, and a debris flow. The...
Seeing Is Believing: The Documentation of Rock Art (2018)
This presentation examines traditional, contemporary, and experimental methods of illustration and photography in rock art recording. Addressed accordingly are the processes and problems unique to pictographic (painted) and petroglyphic (pecked) parietal imagery, superimposition and dating. As a rock art researcher, photographer, and artist, many examples will be drawn from my fieldwork; specifically contemporary methods utilizing panoramic photography and an experimental photographic technique...
Sexual Division of Labor and Technological Change at the Pleistocene to Holocene Transition in the Great Basin. (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A recent reinterpretation of global ethnography challenges the "men hunt, women gather" stereotype, finding cross-cultural evidence that women regularly hunted in foraging societies. Another study finds bioarchaeological evidence of women's role in hunting large game during the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition in the Americas. Although provocative, these...
Shaping the Past: A Geometric Morphometric Approach to the Diversity of Lithic Tools in São Paulo State, Southeastern Brazil (2024)
This is an abstract from the "“The South Also Exists”: The Current State of Prehistoric Archaeology in Brazil: Dialogues across Different Theoretical Approaches and Research Agendas" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geometric morphometrics is a powerful analytical method developed in evolutionary biology to study, quantify, and compare shape variations in biological specimens. Archaeologists have been applying geometric morphometric methods (GMM) to...
Shifting Tides and the Role of 'Big Data': Modeling Paleoindian Land Use and Site Preservation in the Aucilla Basin, Florida (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The past 18,000 years in northern Florida have been characterized by shifts in climate and sea level, which affected settlement patterns and site preservation. Regional sea level curves have only recently been established with the accuracy and resolution required to model paleohydrology (Joy 2018). Advances in non-linear modeling and the use of multi-sclar...
Shock and Awe: An Insider's View of the "Stanford Phenomenon" (2018)
In the early 1970s Clifford Evans created a "Paleoindian Program" at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Clovis was well-established in the literature, but its origins and antecedents were mysterious. Dennis Stanford had just received his PhD on Thule culture studies in Barrow, Alaska, but his real love was Paleoindians. After arriving at the SI he picked up the mantle of the Institution’s pioneering Paleoindian researcher, Frank Roberts, and instituted large-scale projects at...
The Significance of Stone Features on the Northern Plains: Criteria A-D and Other Issues (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The complex set of interrelated stone circles on the northern Great Plains and where literally hundreds of thousands of stone circles exist as marks on the ground left by those who came before us and our direct ancestors are a trifecta of multi-component, multi-generational, multi-nation site complexes. These stone circles arise in singular patterns and large...
Simmons at DRI: Years of Famine and Triumph (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Prior to his long and distinguished professorial career at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, Alan Simmons spent eight years in Reno at the Desert Research Institute (DRI), an independent soft-money component of Nevada’s university system. For a young Near Eastern...
Simulating Organic Projectile Point Damage on Bison Pelves (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A Bison latifrons pelvis was discovered eroding out of shoreline sediment at American Falls Reservoir in Idaho in 1953. The ischium section had a unique groove and hole with a depth of 35 mm and 10 mm in diameter. The pelvis was X-rayed in 1961 for indicators of the origin of the damage and this could not be ascertained. An experiment was developed to...
Site Organization and Abandonment Processes: A Late Paleoindian Case Study (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Abandonment processes at the Sentinel Gap site highlight a high degree of formalism, ritual behavior, and sophistication in this Late Paleoindian site record. The structured distribution of recovered remains from the site includes an abandonment overlay of "killed" artifacts, the redistribution of broken objects across the occupation surface, and the burning...
Site Stratigraphy and Radiocarbon Dating at the Shég’ Xdaltth’í’ Site in Central 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. Shég’ Xdaltth’í’ is located approximately 55 km southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska, approximately 55 km northwest of the Broken Mammoth / Mead/Holzman / Swan Point complex of sites, and about 18 km northwest of Upward Sun River. Continuing excavations have provided tens of thousands of material remains, consisting mostly of lithic...
Sixty Years of Research at the Donnelly Ridge Site (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. In 1964, F. H. West investigated Donnelly Ridge, subsequently using material from there and a few other interior Alaskan sites to define what he termed the Denali complex. In later years, numerous archaeologists returned to Donnelly Ridge for monitoring and limited testing, but nothing substantial was done to synthesize all the data or...
Skill Variation in the Manufacture of Lithics at the Shawnee-Minisik Paleoindian Site (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Shawnee-Minisink Archaeological Site (ca. 12,900 cal BP) is one of the most well-excavated Clovis sites in North America. The site is interpreted as a single Paleoindian occupation that measures over 4,000 square meters. This poster focuses on the excavations of a 365 square meter area from which over 18,000 artifacts were mapped using 3D coordinates. As...
Small Mammals from the Hell Gap Site, Wyoming and their Paleoecological Significance (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Hell Gap at 60: Myth? Reality? What Has It Taught Us?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Limited small mammal remains were recovered from Hell Gap during the early 1960s. Based on these remains, a lowering of "life zones" was proposed at Hell Gap around c.a. 10,800 yrs B.P. In 1997, the Early Holocene small mammal population of the Hell Gap site Locality One was reinvestigated. Flotation samples were collected by five...
Small Stemmed Projectile Points, Bow and Arrow, and the Presence of New Human Populations in the Final Late Holocene of South Patagonia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Global “Impact” of Projectile Technologies: Updating Methods and Regional Overviews of the Invention and Transmission of the Spear-Thrower and the Bow and Arrow" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Late Holocene, a variety of stemmed projectile points have been recorded in the Atlantic side of central-south Patagonia. Although some of the so-called Fell IV stemmed projectile points may have been part of a...
Smith Creek Cave Revisited: An Analysis of Western Stemmed Tradition Raw-Material Procurement Strategies and Lithic Technological Organization in the Bonneville Basin (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At the time of its initial discovery by Alan Bryan nearly fifty years ago, the Mount Moriah occupation at Smith Creek Cave was one of the oldest in the Great Basin and played a critical role in establishing the terminal-Pleistocene age of stemmed-point technology in western North America. Today, what is now known as the Western Stemmed Tradition has been...
Some Thoughts on "Clovis": Where Were They From, Where Did They Go, Where Do They Fit in the Peopling of the Western Hemisphere (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This talk will present some opinions I have about Clovis - woven with facts to convince the skeptical. I will define what I mean by "Clovis", show what some others mean by "Clovis", and add some additional ways to think about "Clovis" in both synchronic and diachronic directions. I will present what I think about its origins and about where we might be finding...
Sourcing a State: A Systematic Survey and Statistical Analysis of Wyoming Archaeological Assemblages of Lithic Raw Materials (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This pilot study will systematize the spatial distribution of lithic raw materials in Wyoming by using statistical methods. It revisits decades of curated assemblages from the University of Wyoming Archaeological Repository and places them on the geological landscape using GIS and cluster analyses. Through a systematic sampling strategy of the lithic raw...
Sourcing Archaeological Textiles in the Northern Great Basin: Evaluation of Baseline Geochemical Data (2018)
Archaeological textiles are by nature ephemeral artifacts, leaving the development of analytical methodologies within the realm of culture history stylistic analysis until recently. Developments in geochemical sourcing methods have opened the window to new forms of analysis, including geographically sourcing the materials with which a textile is made. In particular, strontium isotope ratios with their long-term stability relating to archaeological time scales are well-suited for this type of...
The South Gap Site: A 9,000-Year-Old Submerged Hunting Site in Lake Huron with Far Reaching Connections (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Liquid Landscapes: Recent Developments in Submerged Landscape Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The South Gap site is at a depth of 105 feet beneath Lake Huron on a submerged landscape referred to as the Alpena Amberly Ridge (AAR). Once exposed as dry land between 11,000 and 8000 cal BP, the AAR provided a causeway for migrating animals, such as caribou, to cross the Lake Huron basin. The landform also...
A Spatial Analysis of a Knapper's Replication of Debitage Debris from Hunter-Gatherer Camp and Hunting Sites (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As hunter-gatherer groups manufacture and rejuvenate stone tools at hunting and residential sites, they left behind traces of these behaviors in the form of spatial patterns of discarded lithic debris. GIS modelling of the spatial organization of debitage provides a useful tool for comparing lithic reduction episodes from various hunter-gatherer site types....
Spatial Analysis of Surface Locality 5 at Fin del Mundo, Sonora, 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 Paleoindian presence south of the modern geo-political US-Mexico border is relatively poorly understood when compared to that of the rest of North America. A notable exception to this gap in knowledge surrounds the work at Fin del Mundo in Sonora, Mexico. This northern Mexican site is the subject of extensive survey and excavation, revealing the only known...