Northeast Asian Prehistoric Hunter-Gather Lifeways: Multidisciplinary, Individual Life History Approach

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Northeast Asian Prehistoric Hunter-Gather Lifeways: Multidisciplinary, Individual Life History Approach" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This symposium will feature the research of the Baikal Archaeology Project (BAP), an international and multidisciplinary team of scholars investigating Middle Holocene hunter-gatherer culture dynamics. The BAP is rooted in the bioarchaeology of individual life histories approach and provides a unique theoretical perspective and rich empirical data to address the dynamism, variability, and resilience of prehistoric Holocene hunter-gatherers. The BAP focuses on an intensive comparative analysis of two long-term regional trajectories of Holocene hunter-gather culture change (ca. 9,000–3,000 years ago): the Lake Baikal region (Siberia) and Karelia (northeast Europe). The international team of BAP scholars possesses a range of expertise in archaeology, osteology, bioarchaeology, chronology, genetics, paleoenvironmental studies, spatial analysis of multiple isotopic proxies, and ethnography, to comprehensively examine multiple aspects of hunter-gatherer population level and individual life histories. The insights from these synthesized results and ongoing research will promote a greater appreciation for the dynamic pattern of hunter-gatherer cultural variability, both spatially and temporally.