Human Adaptations to Lateglacial and Early Holocene Climate and Environmental Changes: Towards a Trans-Atlantic Perspective (Part 2)
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)
Increasing resolution of paleoenvironmental records are beginning to show the spatiotemporal dynamics of ecosystem responses to different climate changes during the Lateglacial and early Holocene. A primary cause of many of these climate changes were glacier meltwater outbursts from the Laurentide Ice Sheet into the North Atlantic. At present there has been more consideration of the impacts of these different abrupt climate change events on European than North American human populations. This session sets the foundations for bridging this gap and connecting researchers investigating these questions in Europe with researchers investigating these questions in North America. The session seeks to know what particular periods of climate and environmental change impacted both North American and European populations, as well as the periods when there were no such impacts, and where these impacts or non-impacts occurred. Presentations will focus on questions of 1) paleoenvironmental and archaeological data quality and amenability for integration and tests of correlation, 2) temporal leads and lags in local or regional ecosystem and/or human responses to climate change events, and 3) the specific adaptive strategies employed in these human responses (e.g. population collapse, mobility, social networks, raw materials, lithic technology).
Other Keywords
Lithic Technology •
Beringia •
Mobility •
Climate Change •
Ecological Change •
Upper Palaeolithic •
human dispersal •
Lateglacial •
environenmental changes •
Late Quaternary mammals
Geographic Keywords
Europe •
North America - NW Coast/Alaska •
Arctic
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- Documents (5)
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Animal Resources and Technology in Eastern Beringia During the Late Pleistocene (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Bone technology is often omitted from discussions about technological variability and functionality in eastern Beringia, where recovered organic artifacts are rare. However, based on discoveries in Northeastern Eurasia with good organic preservation, it can be surmised that bone technology was similarly important to Beringian hunter-gatherers during the Final Pleistocene. Here we present the results of faunal and spatial analyses of the site of Swan Point CZ4b, the oldest known archaeological...
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Late Glacial Climate Change and the Dispersal of Humans to Beringia: An Ecological Model (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
New studies of ancient as well as modern human genomes suggest that the immediate ancestors of Native Americans began to disperse from greater northeast Asia to Beringia after the last glacial maximum, roughly 20,000 cal BP. These new data require us to reconsider the lengthy incubation period predicted by the Beringian standstill model as well as the place of the Yana RHS site in our understanding of the peopling of Alaska. In this paper, we review the climatic, paleoenvironmental, genomic...
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Late Quaternary Landscape Change and Large Mammal Habitat Fragmentation in Interior Alaska (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
It has been known for sometime that interior Alaskan terrestrial mammalian species diversity and biogeography changed during the Late Glacial and Holocene (16,000 years ago to present). Here we present a synthetic view of how these changes may have been manifested. Herbivores such as bison, camel, caribou, elk, mammoth, moose, horse, and saiga antelope once had widespread biogeographic distribution across Alaska. Several interrelated drivers behind the widespread mammalian shifts in diversity...
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Lithic production, managment and mobility strategies adaptation during the GS-1 and Early Holocene in North-Western France (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
The second half of the Late glacial is marked in North Western Europe by a major climatic instability with clear consequences on the vegetation and in resources density and distribution. At the end of this period, the GS-1 cooling is well recorded and is one of the most important of these events. During this period, hunter-gatherer groups experienced major changes in a large part of Europe extended from Spain to Scandinavia. This period is marked by the rapid spread of a phenomenon characterized...
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Material culture and environmental change at the end of the Late Glacial: examples from Monruz and Champréveyres, Magdalenian and Azilian campsites on the Swiss Plateau. (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
During the Magdalenian in Switzerland the climate was very cold and the landscape was treeless. Faunal assemblages are dominated by horse but include arctic and alpine species. Lithic assemblages include backed bladelets (used to make composite projectile points) and tools used to butcher and process prey. The appearance of bipoints marks a shift in projectile point technology that coincides with an increase in juniper in the pollen record. The débitage show continuity with the preceding period...