Hunter-Gatherer (Other Keyword)
Hunter-Gatherers
1-25 (61 Records)
One of the challenges of Paleoanthropology is developing coherent models for ancient social and economic systems that have no close analogues in the recent archaeological and historical records. Systematic observations of variability among recent foragers produced by Binford, Kelly and others, are vital tools for understanding early humans. They provide necessary frames of reference for predicting variation, and for understanding why observations may not fit predictions. In a 2001 paper we...
Archaeological Excavation at Site 48SW5815, Sweetwater County, Wyoming (2015)
Data recovery excavations at archaeological site 48SW5815 were completed by Western Archaeological Services in the winter of 2012- 2013. 48SW5815 yielded an assemblage of remains suggesting the site area was primarily a locus of repeated low intensity, short-term occupations by hunter-gatherer groups practicing a highly organized subsistence strategy using task specific activity areas which employed greater mobility within a broad spectrum collecting/ foraging system. The excavation of the three...
Archaeological Excavation at the Confluence Housepit Site (48NA4588) (2014)
The archaeological excavation at the Confluence Housepit site yielded a single housepit feature, two associated subfloor thermal basins internal to the housepit substructure, one thermal basin exterior to the housepit substructure, and associated artifacts. The deposit is dated to the Opal phase of the Early Archaic period through four conventional radiocarbon age estimates ranging between 5000 ± 40 and 5390 ± 40 years B.P. The housepit, associated features, and cultural materials are viewed as...
Archaeological Excavation at the Ferris dune Site (48CR310) (2014)
Archaeological excavations at the Ferris Dune site (48CR310) yielded two buried cultural components. Component 1 dated to the Late Prehistoric Uinta phase (950 ± 30 years B.P.), and Component 2 dated to the Late Archaic Deadman Wash phase (1920 ± 30 years B.P.). Component 1 represents a relatively well preserved hunting camp where at least two bison were processed, while the cultural materials associated with Component 2 were appreciably more ephemeral and representative of a nondescript short...
Archaeological Excavation at the Pathfinder Ranch Site (48CR332): A Stratified Multicomponent Site Located Near the Ferris Mountains of Central Wyoming (2014)
The excavated cultural deposit at the Pathfinder Ranch site (48CR332) yielded five cultural components dating to the Uinta phase of the Late Prehistoric (Component 1), the Deadman Wash phase of the Late Archaic (Components 1-2), and the Pine Spring phase of the Late Archaic (Components 3-5). The cultural materials recovered from the five components suggests the occupations represent temporally punctuated short-term hunter-gatherer camps likely characterized by large mammal faunal resource...
Archaeological Survey of the Proposed Sewage System Improvements, Ridgeway, South Carolina (1976)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Architecture and monuments as territorial markers among the hunter-gatherers of the Pacific coast, Atacama Desert (Northern Chile) (2016)
Architecture, as a material device that is perceived and experienced, involves the creation of spatial and visual signatures within a landscape, effectively connecting social groups and territories. In this paper, we explore the role of architecture and monuments in processes of territorialization, land tenure and the use of space among hunter-gatherers of the Pacific coast in the Atacama Desert, Northern Chile. Between 7,000 to 1,000 BP these groups developed diverse ways of making and using...
Characterizing Hunter-Gatherer Ground Stone Bedrock Features in the Northeastern Chihuahuan Desert (2017)
Ground stone bedrock features are common at archaeological sites in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas. These features are human-made depressions pecked, ground, or worn into bedrock or large boulders, and were used for a variety of processing activities by the indigenous peoples. Although archaeologists in the region have informally recognized different "types" of ground stone bedrock features (e.g., slicks, grinding facets, deep mortars), there have been no dedicated studies of...
Cooperation or Competition? The Underwater Archaeology of Communal Hunting Structures (2017)
Forager cooperation can be difficult to detect in archaeological contexts. One approach is to focus on built structures, such as drive lanes or fishing weirs, which required the participation of multiple persons. Yet such features are ephemeral and vulnerable to disturbance and destruction. One way to circumvent these challenges is to target areas with excellent preservation, such as underwater contexts. For example, the cold, fresh water of the Great Lakes preserved 9,000 year old stone built...
Cultural interaction and Fueguian Islands archaeology: discussing Middle and Late Holocene (50º-55º South Latitude, Chile) (2017)
The Fueguian archipelago, dominated by three mayor islands, namely Tierra del Fuego, Dawson and Navarino, is located namely at southernmost end of South America and was peopled by hunter-gatherer societies from c. 10.500 BP to the 20th century. Sea coastline areas have evidence of specialized marine adaptation since c. 7.000 BP, including navigation. Ethnohistoric and ethnographic records account for an overlapping network area of three groups: Selk'nam land hunters and Alacalufe or Kawésqar...
Developing Demographic Proxies for Archaic Faunal Database Integration (2016)
In conjunction with multi-scalar integrative faunal research on the use of aquatic resources by Archaic period hunter-gatherers, the EAFWG has been required to focus on both environmental and demographic reconstructions for both specific locales and larger regions within the interior of the North American Eastern Woodlands. Although the importance of social and ethnic factors has increasingly been recognized, both environmental change and variability and human population growth and aggregation...
Did Increased Landscape Management through Pyrodiversity Lead to a Rise in Deer Procurement in the San Francisco Bay Area? (2017)
Some of the earliest archaeological applications of human behavioral ecology were Central California studies of faunal resource depression by Jack Broughton including a detailed study of the massive Emeryville Shellmound, located on the east shore of San Francisco Bay. An intriguing pattern identified by Broughton was a significant increase in the relative abundance of deer in the later occupational strata at Emeryville. Broughton attributed this shift to the initiation of distant-patch hunting...
Distribution of Piedra De Lumbre "Chert" and Hunter-Gatherer Mobility and Exchange in Southern California (1992)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Early pottery and the quest for fat in Northeastern North America (2017)
Accumulating evidence point toward hunter-gatherer communities as the first inventors of ceramic containers in many parts of the world, but the incentives behind this technological innovation remain elusive. In this presentation, archaeological information and biomolecular data from organic residues analyses are combined to support a scenario in which pre-agricultural communities in Northeastern North America used early pottery as a fat rendering device, whether the fat came from fish oil or...
The Effect of Property Rights on Low-Level Food Production (2017)
A basic premise of economics is that more secure property rights reduce conflict and provide an incentive for individuals to invest capital to increase productivity. This premise underlies recent theories developed by archaeologists that food production and more secure property rights, by necessity, co-evolve. The argument goes like this: Dense and predicable resources provide an incentive for more secure property rights and more secure property rights provide an incentive for individuals to...
The Emergence of Cultural Consensus in Hunter-Gatherers: Towards a Computer Model of Ethnogenesis in the Past (2017)
In this contribution we present the results of a computer simulation of an "artificial society", implemented to understand how cultural identities and cultural standardization may have emerged in a prehistoric hunter-gatherer society as a consequence of restricted cooperation. The aim of the model is to explain how diversity and self-identification may have emerged in the small-scale societies of our prehistoric past. The computer model explores some possible consequences of theoretical...
An ethnoarchaeological study on anthropic markers from a shell-midden in Tierra del Fuego: Lanashuaia II (2015)
Hunter-gatherer sites constitute often challenging research contexts within the discipline of archaeology; identifying and even defining whom Tierra del Fuego constitute an optimum arena for studying anthropic markers in hunter-gatherers sites for two reasons: a) good preservation of archaeological remains; b) a rich ethnographic record about hunter-fisher-gatherer societies who inhabited this region. The aim of this work is to present the first results of an intrasite spatial analysis, based on...
The Evolution of Cooperative Labor within a Long-lived Housepit at the Bridge River site in British Columbia (2017)
At the Bridge River site, British Columbia, evidence for intra-household cooperation appears to center within a time of village growth during late Bridge River 2 (ca.1500-1300 cal. BP) before collapsing into familial-based competitive behavior during Bridge River 3 (ca. 1300-1100 cal. BP). This shift from cooperation to competition occurs in tandem with a rise in inequality as the community experienced a Malthusian ceiling. Building on previous multivariate statistical approaches, further...
Examining Lithic Technological Organization As a Dynamic Cultural Subsystem: the Advantages of an Explicitly Spatial Approach (1993)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Excavation and Survey in the Argentine Andes: Preliminary Field Report of the First IFR Field School in Uspallata, Mendoza (2017)
The first field school in the Uspallata valley, Mendoza, took place in 2016 and was organized by the Institute for Field Research (IFR). Its goals were to clarify the use of the landscape over the last two thousand years by people with an economy that incorporated hunting, gathering, small-scale agriculture, and possibility llama herding. Research was near one of Mendoza’s best known archaeological sites, Cerro Tunduqueral. This site’s dense rock art has been known for decades, but little is...
Excavation at Four Sites (48SW7456, 48SW7457, 48SW15052, 48SW17323) Within the Bridger Coal Company Underground Mine Lease Area (2013)
Data recovery excavations were conducted during the 2010 field season by Western Archaeological Services at four prehistoric sites located within the Bridger Coal Company Underground Lease area. These sites include the Paired Feature site (48SW7456), the Kindra site (48SW7457), the Jake Roble site (48SW15052), and the North Side Playa site (48SW17323). The project area is located in southwest Wyoming within the Deadman Wash drainage system in the western portion of the Wyoming Basin. The area is...
Excavations at 48CR103 Near Savery Creek, Carbon County, Wyoming (2012)
Data recovery excavations were conducted at 48CR103 in southern Carbon County, Wyoming. A single component was identified consisting of at least three features. Soil profiles from these excavations indicated a deflated dunal setting which experienced a high degree of erosion from extensive livestock grazing and extended drought conditions. While no radiometric datable material was recovered, lithic tools suggest a Middle to Late Plains Archaic Period of occupation. Artifacts and features show...
Exploring the Archaeological Applications of ITRAX XRF Soil Analysis in Southern Ontario (2017)
Prehistoric human occupation in Southern Ontario, Canada spans the gamut of ephemeral hunter-gatherer usage to intensive Iroquoian village settlements. ITRAX core scanning has the capacity to explore some of this rich history. Initially developed for environmental core analysis, ITRAX technology can highlight differences in culturally generated chemical signatures between intensive and ephemeral occupations. This automated, non destructive x-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis has the potential to...
Fins, Feathers and Furs: Fish, Bird, and Mammal Remains from a Stege Mound Complex Site, CA-CCO-297 (2015)
During approximately the last thousand years people were at CA-CCO-297 focused upon taking small schools of fishes, aquatic and marine ducks and sea otters. These were obtained from estuarine habitats immediately adjacent to the site. Seasonality profiles for fish/bird/mammal species indicate procurement occurred throughout the year. Harvesting of these taxa was facilitated by the use of watercraft and nets and hunting tactics including mass collection, prey switching and coharvesting....
Forager Mobility in Constructed Environments (2015)
As obligate tool users, humans habitually reconfigure material-resource distributions. It is proposed here that such resource restructuring may have played an important role in shaping hunter-gatherer mobility decisions and the emergent macro-structure of settlement patterns. This paper presents a model of hunter-gatherer mobility in which modifications of places, including the deposition of cultural materials, bias future mobility decisions. With the aid of an agent-based model, this simple...