Hunter-Gatherers/Foragers (Other Keyword)
101-125 (286 Records)
El Fin del Mundo is a Clovis site with multiple activity areas located in the Sonoran Desert of Northwest Mexico. The site contains the only gomphothere (Cuvieronius sp.)-Clovis association yet known in North America and has produced one of the largest assemblages of diagnostic Clovis stone tools south of the US-Mexico border. Zooarchaeological and taphonomic analyses indicate that Locality 1 preserves the remains of two gomphotheres, aged to approximately 2 years and 8-19 years old, and that...
A Greasy Mess: Reconsidering Prehistoric Bone Grease Extraction and its Implications for Site Interpretation (2018)
Ethnohistoric accounts and archaeological evidence show that North American Indigenous hunter gatherers utilized fats and oils rendered from smashing and boiling faunal bone for dietary and other uses. In the archaeological record, evidence of bone grease extraction is interpreted from fractured faunal remains recovered from midden deposits and thermal features. However, most archaeological studies of bone grease extraction tend to focus on subsistence to the exclusion of other uses. This...
Hasketts and Crescents: An Analysis of the Lithic Tools from Weed Lake Ditch, Oregon (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. Several open-air sites with buried stemmed point technology have been discovered in the Harney Basin, southeastern Oregon. These sites provide a unique way to expand our current understanding of Western Stemmed lithic technology and subsistence practices from the late Pleistocene and early Holocene. The research presented...
Hearth Features in High-Latitude Environments (2018)
The depositional context of many high-latitude archaeological sites often inhibits preservation of hearth features and associated organic remains. When preserved, subsurface hearth features provide insight into the role of plant resources in prehistoric hunter-gatherer economies. This research addresses questions of taphonomy, paleoecology, and prehistoric plant use with archaeobotanical analysis of hearth features from sites located in Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve and Gates of the...
High Elevation Land Use in the Cougar Pass Region of the Absaroka Mountains of Northwest Wyoming (2018)
Historically, high elevations have been considered as peripheral to past human cultures. Indeed, high elevation areas are somewhat marginal given their increased energy demands and generally low productivity; yet, archaeological evidence shows that human use of high altitudes reaches far into prehistory. Here I present an analysis of human land use through time and its relationship to major environmental and climatic shifts to determine the conditions under which humans make more or less...
Home Is Where the Plants Are: Spatial Analysis of Land Use during the Archaic Occupation of Coronado National Memorial (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Coronado National Memorial in the Huachuca Mountains is best known as a possible entry point into the American Southwest by Spanish conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado. While Coronado’s historic presence remains a mystery, this small park on the border of Mexico has a rich prehispanic archaeological heritage ranging from Early to Late Archaic period....
Hopewellian Meteoric Iron Use: An Experimental Approach for Exploring Production and Function (2023)
This is an abstract from the "From Hard Rock to Heavy Metal: Metal Tool Production and Use by Indigenous Hunter-Gatherers in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hopewell artisans were innovative and highly skilled craftspeople, demonstrating proficiency with a wide variety of exotic materials, including meteoric iron. Here we explore the material properties of this unique raw material in terms of production and possible function. In this...
Hot Rock Cooking of Desert Lily and Winding Mariposa (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Hot Rocks in Hot Places: Investigating the 10,000-Year Record of Plant Baking across the US-Mexico Borderlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We describe Late Holocene hot rock roasting of desert lily (Hesperocallis undulata) in the Salton Basin of southeastern California, and winding mariposa (Calochortus flexuosus) near the Virgin and Muddy rivers confluence in southern Nevada. We briefly note differences but focus...
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 Adaptation to Middle Holocene Aridity in the Northwestern Great Basin: Coprolites and Season of Occupation at the Paisley Caves, Oregon (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The middle Holocene (9000–6000 cal BP) in the northwestern Great Basin is marked by warmer and drier conditions resulting in significant ecological change. There is archaeological evidence for population decline, highly mobile groups occupying temporary camps, and a focus on seasonally productive resources. Most sites are located on dunes or lake margins...
Human-Environment Interactions: The Role of Foragers in the Development of Mobile Pastoralism in Mongolia's Desert-Steppe (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents a research design to investigate the role of foragers in the evolution of pastoralism in Mongolia’s desert-steppe. Past efforts to understand the origins of herding have been stymied by the "steppe and sown" dichotomy that perpetuates long held stereotypes of farmers and...
Hunted Deer and Buried Foxes: Fauna from the Middle Epipaleolithic Site of ‘Uyun al-Hammam (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Levantine Epipaleolithic (ca. 23,000—11,500 cal BP) saw an explosion of behavioral innovation and diversification in hunter-gatherer groups. One of these new behaviors was the development and spread of repetitively used and reused burial grounds or cemeteries. The Middle Epipaleolithic site of ‘Uyun al-Hammam in the Wadi Ziqlab area of Northern Jordan...
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...
Hunter-Gatherer Responses to the "Early" African Humid Period ~15-12 ka (2018)
Recent paleoclimate studies indicate rainfall increased dramatically over many parts of northeastern and eastern Africa at the end of MIS 2 and the hyper-arid LGM ~14.7 ka, thereby marking the beginning of MIS 1 and the "African Humid Period" (AHP). These studies also suggest that not only should the "early" AHP be decoupled from the start of the Holocene some 3000 years later, it should also encompass the cooler, more arid Younger Dryas (12.9-11.7 ka). This paper explores two key questions: 1)...
Hunting Activities of Upper Paleolithic Humans in the Japanese Archipelago (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Much of the Japanese archipelago is covered with layers of acidic loam originating from volcanic eruptions. For this reason, there are very few Paleolithic sites that contain well-preserved faunal remains. In fact, there are only six known sites on the four main islands of Japan (Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu Islands) which have seen the excavation of...
Hunting vs. Herding: The Eastern and Central Tibetan Plateau’s Earliest Inhabitants (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our understanding of when and how humans settled high altitude (>3000 m.a.s.l.) regions of the Tibetan Plateau has been greatly extended in the past decade. In this paper, we shift the focus from plants to animal resources, and explore the diversity of animal-based subsistence strategies...
Identifying Animal Management Strategies in Pre-domestication Contexts (2023)
This is an abstract from the "From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept of domestication highlights a form of human intervention in animal reproduction that is at the extreme in a continuum of human-animal relations. Despite the extreme nature of this category of interaction, domestication remains difficult to distinguish archaeologically and...
Imports and Outcrops: Characterizing the Baantu Obsidian Source and Artifacts from Mochena Borago Rockshelter, Wolaita, Ethiopia, Using Portable X-Ray Fluorescence (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Material Sourcing and Provenience Studies in Africa" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Forty-two obsidian samples from the Baantu obsidian source, including 25 outcrop samples and 17 surface artifacts, were characterized using portable X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy. These source data were then compared to 116 obsidian artifacts from Mochena Borago Rockshelter, excavated from levels dated to >50 ka BP...
"In pursuit of the past": Borrero Influences in our Regional Research in the NW of Patagonia (Chubut, Argentina) (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. This presentation aims to highlight the theoretical and methodological relevance of Borrero’s work to address regional research in Patagonia through our own project in Genoa and Pico valleys...
Insights into the Late Upper Paleolithic of the Northern Adriatic from Ljubićeva Cave, Istria (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on the Paleolithic in the Mediterranean Region" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the results of past and recent systematic research on the late Upper Paleolithic carried out in Ljubićeva Cave near Marčana, Croatia. The first excavations of the site occurred between 2008 and 2011 and yielded late Upper Paleolithic as well as Neolithic and Bronze Age discoveries. Since 2019, systematic...
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...
Introduction to Session: Recent Research and Future Objectives (2023)
This is an abstract from the "From Hard Rock to Heavy Metal: Metal Tool Production and Use by Indigenous Hunter-Gatherers in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The discovery and development of metals as tool media is a topic of global interest. Although this phenomenon is generally associated with sedentary, agrarian-based societies, in North America there is regularly documented, albeit not widely known, use of metals by...