Interdisciplinary Research into the Late Pleistocene of Europe

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Interdisciplinary Research into the Late Pleistocene of Europe" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent years have seen a rise in cross-disciplinary research into the Late Pleistocene from across Europe including paleogenomics, stable isotopes, remote sensing, and paleoproteomics. These techniques sit alongside traditional paleoanthropological and archaeological methodologies where the fusion of traditional and novel approaches leads to new and cutting-edge research. The Late Pleistocene is a crucial period for understanding biocultural interactions, movement, and population dynamics between Neanderthals and modern humans, as well as interesting and, at the moment, still poorly understood aspects of various Upper Paleolithic peoples. These new techniques, combined with standard archaeological approaches, are particularly well suited to addressing questions about how, when, and perhaps why these groups may have interacted, as well as when and where certain cultural innovations appeared.