Papers in Honor of Lawrence Guy Straus
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)
This symposium honors Lawrence Guy Straus’s four decades of research in Paleolithic archaeology and 20 years’ service as the editor of the Journal of Anthropological Research. Straus is best known for his long-term research in the Vasco-Cantabrian Upper Paleolithic, though his 40-year career has seen projects in Belgium, Portugal, and France as well as Spain. His research syntheses have advanced the understanding of long-term behavioral change in Paleolithic societies and influenced two generations of Paleolithic archaeologists. In this session we invite fellow archaeologists to reflect upon the intellectual and personal influence Lawrence’s work has had on our lives and research. The invited papers presented in this session trace Lawrence’s long career and highlight his contributions to Paleolithic research and researchers.
Other Keywords
Upper Paleolithic •
Solutrean •
Lithic Analysis •
Cave •
Maya •
Mesoamerica •
Lithic Technology •
Lithics •
Curation •
Adaptation
Geographic Keywords
Europe •
Mesoamerica •
North America - Southwest •
East/Southeast Asia •
West Asia
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-11 of 11)
- Documents (11)
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Beers with Lawrence and Insights into Magdalenian Visual Display at El Mirón Cave (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
In 1996 Lawrence Guy Straus embarked on new adventures in fieldwork at El Mirón Cave in Cantabria, northern Spain. As a young University of New Mexico graduate student the author joined him there from 1997–2000. Excavating literally thousands of Magdalenian artifacts and features in the cave’s corral area and visiting other Magdalenian caves on weekends made Lawrence’s fact-filled and captivating classroom lectures come alive. The author’s fascination with personal ornamentation and...
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Climate Change and Out of Africa Dispersals (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
International, interdisciplinary fieldwork is at the core of Lawrence Straus' long-term archaeological research. Inspired by such an approach since my involvement with Straus' excavations at the Abri Dufaure in southwest France, I have been conducting field work in the Arabian peninsula, which aims to understand the relationship between climate change and human demography across the Pleistocene. Satellite images and GIS studies have effectively demonstrated that there were wet phases in this...
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An early Gravettian point cache from Vale Boi: implications for the arrival of Anatomically Modern Humans to southern Iberia (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
During the 2014 and 2015 field season, we have excavated a new loci with an early Gravettian horizon in the Rock Shelter area of the site of Vale Boi, Southern Portugal. The loci is marked by a unique cache composed of close to 20 artifacts, most of which are pristine backed points in non-local chert. Due to typological characteristics, that includes points identical to those found in Pego do Diabo cave near Lisbon, and to those found in Vale Boi dated to 32.5 ka cal BP, as well as to the...
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Human occupation of Lapa do Picareiro (Portugal) during the Last Glacial Maximum (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
During the Last Glacial Maximum, abrupt climate changes created highly variable paleoenvironments inhabited by human populations across the Iberian Peninsula. Pollen and sedimentary analyses from deep-sea cores off Portugal provide records of regional-scale paleoenvironmental responses to the climate shifts that punctuated the LGM. Archaeological assemblages from caves and rockshelters offer a more local-scale understanding of human-environment interactions during this period. One site in...
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The Impact of Lawrence Straus on Mesoamerican Cave Studies (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Lawrence Straus’ life work has focused primarily upon European cave archaeology, with most of his time spent in Spain. However his research within cave archaeology has in many ways aided the field of cave archaeology in Central America. Straus has both passively and actively helped in the advancement of Maya cave studies from his many roles in academia. As editor in chief for the Journal of Anthropological Research he aided in the publication of numerous seminal works that contributed to the...
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Late Wurm adaptive systems in Tohoku Japan: viewed from lithic use-wear analysis (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
The paper investigates lithic use-wear data from the viewpoint of human mobility patterns and functional inter-site variability. Microwear analysis based on controlled experiments was initiated in 1970s in Japan, and the method combined both high power and low power (that is, high magnification and low magnification) approach. Since then accumulated case studies focused on the Upper Paleolithic period of Northeastern Honshu Island of Japan (Tohoku District). Chronological sequences and...
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Lawrence Straus on Palaeolithic Art: How to marry art and adaptation? (2016)
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As a great specialist in Palaeolithic Archaeology of the Old World, and also a superb connoisseur of the painted and engraved caves of France and Spain, Professor Straus had to deal with the problem of fitting the evidence of Palaeolithic “art” in the general adaptive framework of the processual Archaeology he was practicing along his professional career. In this presentation I want to analyze the evolution of his thinking about this topic, as a reflection on the general theoretical problems...
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Le Volgu: A North American Perspective on a Biface Cache from the French Upper Paleolithic (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Le Volgu consists of at least 15 exquisitely manufactured bifacial stone tools (17 were originally reported in 1874) found in Saône-et-Loire near the confluence of the Arroux and Loire Rivers, about 60 km (37 miles) west of Le Solutre, the type site for the Solutrean culture. The assemblage is interpreted as an artifact cache or ritual deposit and the artifacts themselves are considered exemplary of Solutrean bifacial technology. This paper reports the results of applying methods developed for...
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Lithics, Landscapes & la Longue-Durée – Curation as an Expression of Forager Mobility (2016)
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With the recognition that practically all archaeological sites are depositional composites unrelated to the activities of any contemporary group of individuals (i.e., palimpsests) and that forager adaptations are not ‘site-specific’ but rather landscape-scaled phenomena, statistical approaches designed to take these predicates into account have been developed over the past decade that depart from the traditional techno-typological systematics used for decades in much of Europe and the Levant....
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The Origins of Agriculture and Neolithic in the American Southwest: The View from Western Europe (2016)
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The transition from foraging to farming is certainly one of the most dramatic processes in human history. The use of domesticated plants spread widely across Western Europe from the Near East, and across the American Southwest from Mexico. Research in Western Europe has traditionally focused on the movement of farming communities across the region which displaced or subsumed local foragers. Recently various aspects of this process have been discussed including climate change, the expansion of...
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Passage through a Palimpsest: Lower Magdalenian Lithic Manufacture and Maintenance Patterns in El Mirón Cave, Cantabria, Spain (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
El Mirón cave, a major Upper Paleolithic residential site in Cantabria, Spain, has been the subject of long-term excavations led in part by Lawrence Straus. This presentation focuses on Level 17, a significant Lower Magdalenian deposit excavated in the cave’s outer vestibule. Level 17, which is a total of 33cm thick, was divided into 13 sublevels that were created using correlations made between depth measurements taken during the excavation in each square meter of the 9.5 square meter area....