American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents

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 "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Americas exhibit a massive range of environmental settings and hunter-gatherer lifeways that are often considered at a regional level. However, consideration of archaeological records more broadly across different ecologies and regions is essential for understanding the relationship between environmental variables and human behavior. Exploring the archaeological records of diverse North and South American landscapes in relation to each other facilitates the exploration of topics such as cultural transmission, mobility and migration, resource exploitation, and the ways that humans’ adaptation to their local environments shaped the archaeological record we study today. By considering the many manifestations of the foraging economy in the Americas, this session will strengthen our ability to make cross-regional comparisons for continents unique for their relatively recent peopling. This symposium brings together early-career and established scholars to present research on forager-environmental interactions in regions across the Americas, including the Arctic, the Andes, the Great Plains, the Colorado Plateau, the Great Basin, the North American Southeast, and Patagonia. Discussion at this level will demonstrate the importance of considering different regions in relation to each other when interpreting past human behaviors.

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-11 of 11)

  • Documents (11)

Documents
  • Considering the Role of Mammoth and Other Megafauna in Food Systems across North America (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Briana Doering. Madeline Mackie.

    This is an abstract from the "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists agree that proboscideans and other megafauna played a role in lifeways of the first Americans. From eastern Beringia to central America, the evidence is unequivocal: humans hunted mammoths. But what role did these animals play in the food systems of the first Americans? New research at several...

  • Dispatches from an Archaeological "Backwater": Microwear as a Proxy Measure of Paleoindian Landscape Use in the Far Northeast (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Rockwell.

    This is an abstract from the "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have been examining and publishing on the fluted point period for over a century. However, the northeastern United States has received comparably less attention from the professional discipline, with one colleague describing prehistoric archaeology in New England as an archaeological backwater. This...

  • Early Forager Responses to Ecological Changes in Southeastern North America (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesse Tune. Sonya McGruire.

    This is an abstract from the "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The timing and process of initial human colonization of the Americas has been at the forefront of archaeological inquiry for more than a century. Today we have moved beyond simply asking “when?” and “from where?” did the first Americans arrive and are now able to investigate more nuanced questions about what life...

  • The Effect of Sex on Diet: Isotopic Variation among North and South American Foragers (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Randy Haas. Jennifer Chen. Tammy Buonasera. Jelmer Eerkens.

    This is an abstract from the "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The extent to which subsistence labor was divided among archaeological forager populations of the Americas is currently debated. This analysis uses bone isotope chemistry and Bayesian mixing models to examine trophic variation between female and male individuals from North and South American forager populations....

  • Exploring the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition Archaeological Record on the Colorado Plateau (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Abby Baka. K. Blake Vernon. Madeline Mackie. Jerry Spangler. Alexandra Greenwald.

    This is an abstract from the "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Pleistocene-Holocene transition (PHT) archaeological record on the Colorado Plateau is notably sparse, especially when compared to the surrounding Great Basin, Rocky Mountain, and Plains regions. Whether this dearth is due to low human populations in the region during the PHT, or due to insufficient fieldwork...

  • Forager Adaptations to Andean Cloud Forest, Peru (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Pratt.

    This is an abstract from the "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cloud forests are montane tropical rainforests typically characterized by persistent fog, diverse microclimates, and rich biodiversity. Although some regions have long histories of development of technological and sociopolitical complexity in cloud forests (e.g., the Mayan highlands), in the central Andes cloud...

  • Geoarchaeology and Paleoenvironmental Context of Magic Mountain (5JF223): A Stratified Site on the Front Range of the Southern Rocky Mountains, North-Central Colorado (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Rolfe Mandel.

    This is an abstract from the "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Magic Mountain site (5JF223) in Golden, Colorado, has long been recognized as one the most important stratified archaeological sites on the Front Range of the Southern Rocky Mountains. Although Archaic artifacts have been recorded there, the site’s richest and most extensive cultural deposits represent...

  • Lithic Technological and Use-Wear Analysis for Two Paleoindian Sites at the Kanorado Locality, Kansas (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Bethany Potter. Kelly Graf. Rolfe Mandel.

    This is an abstract from the "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents results of an analysis of lithic artifacts from the Kanorado Locality in the High Plains of Western Kansas. The Kanorado Locality is a stratified Clovis-age and Folsom/Midland occupation along Middle Beaver Creek. The Clovis adaptation in the Great Plains is well-documented, but not as...

  • Molecular and Isotopic Analysis Indicates Variable Uses for Early Pottery from Northwest Alaska (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Tammy Buonasera. Shelby Anderson.

    This is an abstract from the "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramic technology was adopted approximately 2,800 and 2,500 years ago in Alaska, coinciding with a transition toward an economy increasingly focused on marine resource use. Despite expectations for marine resource use in early northern pottery, an initial pilot study found strong evidence for freshwater aquatic...

  • The Relationship between Human Subsistence Strategies and Late-Quaternary Paleoenvironmental Changes in the Northern Chihuahuan Desert of Southwest Texas (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Erika Blecha. Rolfe Mandel. Emily Reed. Arlene Rosen.

    This is an abstract from the "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous studies of the northern Chihuahuan Desert and Trans-Pecos region of west Texas primarily used plant macrofossils from Neotoma sp. middens to reconstruct Holocene and late Pleistocene paleoenvironments, offering researchers a general understanding of bioclimatic change for the period of record. Given the...

  • Utilizing Drone Modeling to Facilitate Targeted Pedestrian Survey in Central Western Patagonia (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Beggen.

    This is an abstract from the "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Regional archaeological survey is notably difficult in continental Aysén, Chile. Many researchers mark the difficult terrain and dense vegetation of forest and forest-steppe biomes of this region of Central Western Patagonia as major factors limiting our ability to identify new archaeological sites. Thus far, most...