Paleoindian and Paleoamerican (Other Keyword)
301-325 (596 Records)
Migration is a fundamental aspect of humanity and archaeologists have long been interested in studies of human mobility. Some archaeologists have taken a historical ecological approach to understanding human movement and how a deep history can inform on mobility in contemporary society. By leveraging knowledge from a variety of disciplines, these archaeologists have made great strides in our understanding of past human movement as it relates to postglacial human dispersals and climate change, a...
Limuw as a Cultural Landscape: Precontact Sites on Eastern Santa Cruz Island (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Eastern Santa Cruz Island has a high density of archeological sites dating from 10,000 BP through historic contact, and at least seven associated Chumash place names. The area has freshwater seeps, abundant chert toolstone, and access to rich marine resources, including boat anchorages. At the time of historic contact, the largest Chumash village on the...
Linguistic Prehistory and Migration in Northwest California in Light of Recent Paleoindian Evidence (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper provides context to the linguistic and migrational prehistory of Northwest California and reinterprets the common narrative in light of the recent discovery of a Clovis point in Larabee Valley which extends the reach of Paleoindians into Humboldt County, California for the first time.
Listening to One Another: Contributions of Indigenous People to the Life and Research of Dennis Stanford (2018)
A wealth of mentors, colleagues, and friends influence the evolution of one’s approach to archaeological research. This paper reflects on Dennis Stanford’s associations with native people beginning with his graduate student days involved in audio recording American Indian Oral Histories for the Doris Duke Foundation, including learning from Santa Ana Pueblo Cacique Porfirio Montoya and his wife Eudora Montoya, assisting with land claims for the return of Sacred Blue Lake to the people of Taos...
The Lithic Landscape of the Nenana Valley: Investigating Land-Use and Toolstone Procurement Activities in Interior Alaska (2018)
Investigating prehistoric landscape use is significant in answering questions about the adaptive strategies and behaviors of prehistoric Beringians. How can we define the lithic landscape? How did humans provision themselves in eastern Beringia, and how did these provisioning behaviors change through time? Toolstone procurement and selection behaviors influence toolkits, mobility, and settlement strategies; therefore, they are important in explaining prehistoric behavioral adaptation and the...
Lithic Technological and Use-Wear Analysis for Two Paleoindian Sites at the Kanorado Locality, Kansas (2024)
This is an abstract from the "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents results of an analysis of lithic artifacts from the Kanorado Locality in the High Plains of Western Kansas. The Kanorado Locality is a stratified Clovis-age and Folsom/Midland occupation along Middle Beaver Creek. The Clovis adaptation in the Great Plains is well-documented, but not as...
Lithic Technologies and Faunal Remains From a Terminal Pleistocene Pit Feature at Cooper’s Ferry, 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. A new study at the Cooper’s Ferry site (10IH73) located in west central Idaho focuses on the contents of pit feature 110 of Area B. Feature 110 (F110) has been dated between ~9938 ± 36 BP (11,352–11,264 cal BP) and ~9867 ± 36 BP (11,278–11,223 cal BP) and contains WST points, debitage, and faunal remains. Notably, the F110 faunal record includes a...
Long-Term Cultural Persistence in Modern Humans: Some Case Studies from Early and Mid-Holocene Archaeological Traditions in Eastern South America and Theoretical Implications (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We will present chronological, morphometrical, technological, and subsistence data coming from eastern South America related to four Paleoindian cultural traditions occupying different areas since the beginning of the Holocene. All these four traditions present a remarkable cultural stability that shows few parallels in the archaeological record. Using these...
Looking for Lomas (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Loma Oases are ecosystems unique to the arid central-western coast of South America, formed by the winter fog that accumulates on the slopes of the Andean foothills. They become seasonal homes to a unique and diverse suite of plant and animal species. Consequently, archaeologists hypothesize that Loma environments were vital to prehistoric Peruvian...
Looking for Sites in all the Wrong Places: Finding Evidence of Preceramic Occupations in Northern Highland Ecuador (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Research and CRM Are Not Mutually Exclusive: J. Stephen Athens—Forty Years and Counting" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. J.S. Athens and colleagues recently published evidence of early maize (6,600 CAL BP) from a lake core in northern highland Ecuador. Deposits with maize phytoliths and pollen were interspersed with ash layers from volcanic eruptions. The various geological processes that have shaped the environment...
Low and Slow: Landscape Taphonomy of High-Altitude Landscapes within the Southern Rocky Mountains of Colorado (2023)
This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past 10 years, survey crews from CSU’s Center for Mountain and Plains Archaeology examined the alpine ecosystem of the Colorado Front Range, recording a variety of sites such as game drives, lithic and ceramic scatters, and ice patches within Rocky Mountain National Park and adjacent wilderness areas. We...
Luis Alberto Borrero South-North Drift, Multiple Markers for the Archaeology of Tierra del Fuego and the Fueguian Archipelago (52º-56º S) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Patagonian Evolutionary Archaeology and Human Paleoecology: Commending the Legacy (Still in the Making) of Luis Alberto Borrero in the Interpretation of Hunter-Gatherer Studies of the Southern Cone" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The contributions and influence of Luis Borrero started with his early work at Tierra del Fuego and then surpassed multiple barriers –including the Strait of Magellan- as he developed an...
Luis Borrero´s Model of Peopling of Patagonia: Some Examples of his Application in Lithic and Mobility Studies (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Patagonian Evolutionary Archaeology and Human Paleoecology: Commending the Legacy (Still in the Making) of Luis Alberto Borrero in the Interpretation of Hunter-Gatherer Studies of the Southern Cone" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Borrero's work has greatly influenced Patagonian archaeology. Through his papers and classes, he strongly influenced new generations of archaeologists. In the case of lithic studies, his...
The Manufacture of Northern Fluted Points: A Production Sequence Hypothesis (2018)
Fluted projectile points have been found in the archaeological record of the North American Arctic for over 50 years. Only recently, however, have fluted points found in buried contexts associated with dateable materials and included in region-wide comparative analyses provided chronological, morphological, and technological evidence to support the cohesion of the Arctic specimens as their own fluted variant: the Northern Fluted Complex (NFC). Few sites have provided the opportunity to observe...
Manufacturing Costs of Long Pestles in Late Period Central California: Results from Replicative Experiments (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Formal Models and Experimental Archaeology of Ground Stone Milling Technology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The shift to mortars and pestles is associated with the acorn-based resource intensification in central California, which is also linked with decreased mobility and changes in social organization. Many long (>35 cm) and completely shaped pestles are associated with Late period California (cal AD 1265–1770)...
Mapping the Younger Dryas Landscape of the San Dieguito Paleochannel (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans had established presence on California’s Channel Islands by the Younger Dryas (YD) Period (~12.9-11.7 ky BP), during which stable sea level was relatively stable for ~1 ky. No archaeological sites from this time have been identified on the nearby continental shelf, likely destroyed by subsequent rapid sea level rise, but submerged paleochannels...
Meadowcroft Rockshelter 2023: Revisit (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The year 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of initiation of excavations at Meadowcroft Rockshelter in southwestern Pennsylvania. Meadowcroft was the first serious challenge to the Clovis-first peopling model that had dominated American archaeological thought for decades. Generations of students have passed through graduate schools since the early excavations...
Measuring Past Networks of Cultural Transmission: The Haskett Projectile Point (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology from Western North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Advances in technology such as 3D digital scanning and spatial analysis software have provided archaeologists with novel data. Specifically, these methods increase the researcher’s ability to measure artifact morphology and past networks of cultural transmission, to potentially track the movement of past peoples and ideas through space and time....
Megafauna 101 for Archaeologists (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Pleistocene... basically a no-man's land that is trapped between the disciplines of archaeology and paleontology when it comes to the animals that inhabited that period. For American archaeologists, these animals are sometimes too old to be considered as having archaeological connotations. For Paleontologists, these are not fossils and, by some...
Mesodesma donacium as a Paleoclimatic Archive on the Coast of Peru (2018)
Quebrada Jaguay is one of the earliest maritime settlements in the New World. The southern Peruvian coastal site was occupied from the Terminal Pleistocene to the Middle Holocene ~13 to 8 ka and demonstrates a society highly dependent upon marine resources. Archaeological deposits excavated in the 1990’s and 2017 contained high volumes of marine faunal remains, predominantly the surf clam Mesodesma donacium, which accounts for 99% of the shell remains. M. donacium are used in this study to...
Microarchaeological Approaches to the Identification of the Younger Dryas in the Northern Great Basin (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Far West Paleoindian Archaeology: Papers from the Next Generation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Younger Dryas Chronozone (YDC) is a cooling event occurring 12,900–11,600 years ago (cal BP) marked by rapid changes in plant and animal communities, subsequently affecting late Pleistocene human population organization and settlement dynamics across the globe. In North America’s Northern Great Basin, these changes...
Microfauna Analysis at the La Prele Mammoth Site (48CO1401): Implications for Clovis Diet and Paleoenvironments (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most of the research focusing on Late Pleistocene hunting has been tailored to examining megafauna, with microfauna receiving little attention in the Clovis archaeological record. This project examines the microfauna remains recovered from the La Prele Mammoth Site (48CO1401). La Prele is an open-air Clovis mammoth camp and kill site located in Converse...
Micromorphological Analysis of Deposition, Pedogenesis, and Stratigraphic Integrity at the McDonald Creek Site, Central Alaska (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. Despite the fact that archaeologists have long turned to the Alaskan archaeological record to answer questions about the first Americans, little is certain about the peopling of Beringia. The poor preservation of faunal remains in many central Alaskan archaeological sites has...
Miniature Folsom Points from the Lindenmeier Site, Colorado (2018)
Among the Folsom artifacts excavated by Frank Roberts at the Lindenmeier site in Colorado are several unusually small projectile points, both fluted and unfluted. This paper explores the hypothesis that these miniature points are toys. To do so, we review the ethnographic literature on miniature weapons and contextualize the production and use of such objects. Second, we compare the small Folsom artifacts to full-size points from a typological and technological point of view. Finally, we discuss...
The Missing Mammals of Cerro Azul (Guaviare, Colombia): Extreme Fragmentation in Neotropical Zooarchaeological Assemblages (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ongoing research by the LASTJOURNEY project has investigated multiple archaeological sites located near rock art panels in the Serranía La Lindosa, Colombia, to explore human-environmental interactions during the Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene transition. Due to severe taphonomic conditions in the Colombian Amazon, only one of these sites, Cerro Azul, has...