Inference in Paleoarchaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ross Pain. Anton Killin.

This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cognitive archaeology faces the problem of minimum necessary competence: as the most sophisticated thinking of ancient hominins may have been in domains that leave no archaeological signature, it is safest to assume that tool production and use reflects only the lower boundary of cognitive capacities. Cognitive archaeology involves selecting a model from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Braun.

This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeology of human origins represents one of the key insights into what it means to be human. Despite this optimistic outlook, the archaeological record represents a dismally preserved record of untranslated objects. Archaeologists have become increasingly good at devising stories about the records of behaviors that our artifacts represent. However,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon McPherron.

This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Insights into flake formation have come from fracture mechanics, controlled experiments, replication studies, and attribute analysis of lithic assemblages. Fracture mechanics would seem to offer great potential for offering insights into how the variables that knappers manipulate actually change flaking outcomes, and its strength is that it is based on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Thompson.

This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is no consensus about how to define the first paleoarchaeological record, or how old it is. An assemblage of flaked stone artifacts from Lomekwi 3, Kenya, dates to 3.3 million years ago. Two fossil specimens at the 3.34-million-year-old site of Dikika-55, Ethiopia, preserve butchery marks on their surfaces. The strength of interpretation that these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philip Carr.

This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the late twentieth century, the investigation of settlement patterns and mobility were considered important archaeological endeavors. Analyzing stone tools assemblages to make inferences of group mobility was based on utilizing simple dichotomies. For stone tools, the concepts of curated and expedient dominated thinking. Likewise, the constructs of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Davies. Matthew Douglass.

This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Concepts from resilience theory (RT) have been variously applied in studies of the deep human past. Given emphasis on cross-scale interactions and cyclical trajectories, RT provides a framework to interpret historical sequences in terms of general ecological processes. However, less consideration has been given to the interface between the trajectories of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sam Lin. Alex Mackay.

This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In archaeology, distinct processes in the past can generate similar patterning in the material record under varying temporal and spatial scales. Facing this challenge of equifinality, archaeologists frequently use parsimony to help assess competing explanatory models by preferring simpler explanations over more complex ones. However, there is little...