A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
For five decades, Lawrence C. Todd has fueled archaeology on multiple continents with a steady stream of novel ideas, innovative methods, and remarkable datasets. He has made substantive, empirical contributions to faunal exploitation, occupation of high-altitude environments, human evolution, field methods, and the prehistory of North America, Africa, and Asia. This session reflects on his valued contributions: celebrating his influence on how we view, record, and attempt to explain the archaeological record and how we must continually generate new questions to confront our often-unchallenged assumptions about the past.
Other Keywords
Zooarchaeology •
Paleoindian and Paleoamerican •
Hunter-Gatherers/Foragers •
Taphonomy and Site Formation •
demography •
Lithic Analysis •
Geoarchaeology •
Bison •
Obsidian •
Dating Techniques
Geographic Keywords
North America: Rocky Mountains •
North America •
United States of America (Country) •
United Mexican States (Country) •
Department of Martinique (Country) •
Republic of El Salvador (Country) •
Department of Guadeloupe (Country) •
Cayman Islands (Country) •
Antigua and Barbuda (Country) •
Turks and Caicos Islands (Country)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-12 of 12)
- Documents (12)
-
"Have You Ever Seen a Walrus in Nebraska?" Reflections on the Career and Contributions of Larry Todd (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation presents several case studies that highlight the contributions that Larry Todd has made to the study of human paleoecology.
-
High-Elevation Bison in the Rocky Mountain Front Range during the Late Holocene (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the late Holocene, large bison herds occurred in grass-dominated ecological zones across much of the North American mid-continent. However, in situ fossils and historic accounts illustrate the adaptability of bison to a broad ecological niche space, from grassy prairies and plains to eastern forests. Yet,...
-
Lawrence C. Todd: Biographical Sketch and Introduction (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the course of a five-decades-long career, Lawrence C. Todd, Professor Emeritus, Colorado State University, has made substantive contributions to the practice and theory of anthropological archaeology and world prehistory, introduced thousands of undergraduate students to the discipline in his classes, and...
-
Low and Slow: Landscape Taphonomy of High-Altitude Landscapes within the Southern Rocky Mountains of Colorado (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past 10 years, survey crews from CSU’s Center for Mountain and Plains Archaeology examined the alpine ecosystem of the Colorado Front Range, recording a variety of sites such as game drives, lithic and ceramic scatters, and ice patches within Rocky Mountain National Park and adjacent wilderness areas. We...
-
Luminescence Age Calculation Models, Termites, and Dune History in the Northern Kalahari Desert, Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists often accept optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages with less critical review than those derived from the more commonly used radiocarbon dating methods. This is largely because of an incomplete understanding of optical dating techniques and the modeling assumptions used to calculate these ages....
-
Obsidian Artifacts at 48PA551: Using Obsidian to Address Land Tenure Strategies among Hunter-Gatherers of the Rocky Mountains (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research uses obsidian data from a single site in the GYE to test existing land tenure and territoriality models based on the sourcing and subsequent movement of obsidian. While on a spectrum, existing studies have generally polarized between two major schools of thought. These perspectives diverge over whether...
-
A Precontact, Late Prehistoric Decline in the North American Indigenous Population (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lawrence Todd has long contributed to “big picture” research. Here we discuss one instance of such research using a new radiocarbon database (Kelly et al. 2022, American Antiquity) of >104,000 ages to discuss population trends of North America’s Indigenous population of the past 13,000 years. We focus on the late...
-
Proboscideans, Drought, and Cyanobacteria: Natural Death Events both Present and Past (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lawrence Todd has made substantial contributions to the studies of taphonomy, Paleoindians, and megafauna, among other topics. His foundational research provides the basis for important questions to be asked about megafaunal extinctions. Drawing first on data on elephant deaths in northern Botswana in 2020 that...
-
Spatiotemporal Modeling of the Archaeological Landscape in the Shoshone National Forest (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2002, Dr. Lawrence Todd initiated a multiyear interdisciplinary survey in the Shoshone National Forest in northwest Wyoming. Dr. Todd and his team have meticulously documented several thousand individual artifacts per year. While they only sampled a small fraction of the forest, Dr. Todd’s work has dramatically...
-
Stalking the Bison: Changing Perspectives in the Zooarchaeology of Big Game Hunters of the Great Plains (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the mid-1980s, Lawrence Todd and colleagues published influential, groundbreaking research in Great Plains zooarchaeology. Todd’s pioneering research established innovative methodological and analytical approaches to studying archaeofauna, focusing on large multi-animal bonebeds representing potential kill and...
-
Todd’s Taphonomy: Addressing Questions Too Often Left Unasked (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Larry Todd has played a central role in applying taphonomy to studies of prehistoric human behavior. He developed standardized and, most importantly, reproducible methods of observational quantification. We here present studies of Trinil (Java) and Hadar (Ethiopia), both of which figure prominently in...
-
Unmodified Cobbles and Boulders from the Middle Stone Age Occupation of Witberg 1, Southern Kalahari, South Africa (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Witberg 1 is an open-air Middle Stone Age (MSA) occupation within diatom-rich sediments in the southern Kalahari, suggestive of a small ancient lake system (~360,000–140,000 years-ago). The occupation horizon is dense with flakes, blades, cores, and MSA points, mostly less than 10 cm. However, there are numerous...