Elephant Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miki Ben-Dor.

This is an abstract from the "Elephant Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ubiquity of Proboscidean remains in early archaeological sites across the Old and New World underscores their significance in human prehistory. However, ethnography-based estimates of Proboscidean hunting returns have consistently undervalued their exceptional attractiveness as prey during the Paleolithic period. This study presents a critical reevaluation of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Conard.

This is an abstract from the "Elephant Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paleoltihic research in the Central Europe has its roots in the 1860s with the early excavations in Swabian Jura of southwestern Germany. Since then, every generation has contributed to this tradition. Among the many well-studied Paleolithic periods, the Swabian Aurignacian, the first phase of the Upper Paleolithic dating from ca. 42-35 ka BP, stands out for its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shibani Bose.

This is an abstract from the "Elephant Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Within the panoptic theme of elephant archaeology, this paper employs the prism of material remains to recapitulate the journey of the pachyderm in early Indian history and culture. In a land that is home to the largest population of Asian elephants, bones tell their own tales and so does iconography. While faunal remains affirm the antiquity and close association...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ran Barkai.

This is an abstract from the "Elephant Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this talk I will try to touch upon, and tie together, two major elements in early human adaptation, culture and perception – namely elephants and caves. Proboscideans presence in Paleolithic caves is manifested in two major ways: either as selected body-parts brought in from the hunt for human consumption, or as depictions on the cave’s walls. It is indeed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vlad Litov.

This is an abstract from the "Elephant Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Allocation, procurement, and butchering of proboscideans and megaherbivores were significant to the subsistence of Lower Paleolithic hominins, supported by the persistent Acheulian toolkit. In the Levant, a faunal change around 400 thousand years ago, characterized by the declining availability of megaherbivores and the extinction of elephants, coincides with the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rowan Flad.

This is an abstract from the "Elephant Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Elephant ivory in the form of unmodified tusks, partial tusks and ivory carvings as well as elephant iconography in bronze artifact forms and decorations reflect a set of engagements with this charismatic megafauna taxon during the Bronze Age in China. This paper presents various examples of elephant ivory and elephant iconography from Bronze Age contexts and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Helm.

This is an abstract from the "Elephant Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Elephants are the heaviest extant land mammals, and their capacity to impart substantial forces onto the substrates on which they tread is well documented. Such forces include a seismic component, and seismic communication between elephants has received considerable attention in recent decades. The rock art record in southern Africa suggests that ancestral humans...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Coutu.

This is an abstract from the "Elephant Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Using an artefact biography approach combining archival, archaeological and scientific data, it is becoming easier to source raw materials such as ivory ‘from tusk to town’. By mapping artefact journeys, we learn how materials move and are eventually crafted and valued in different cultural contexts to their origins. This paper will explore some of the key case...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daou Véronique Joiris.

This is an abstract from the "Elephant Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Baka hunter-gatherers of Central Africa have symbolically elaborated a “conceptual domestication” of the forest elephant Loxodonta cyclotis, yet an entirely wild species. That symbolic representation is strongly rooted in Baka naturalist knowledge of interspecific relationships between large mammals, acarids (tiks) and birds. These ethnographic materials...

DOCUMENT Citation Only François Lanoë.

This is an abstract from the "Elephant Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological record of Alaska documents interactions between people and mammoth and offers a different perspective from the rest of the Americas, where research has focused on hunting. Hunting probably did happen in Alaska, but evidence for it is relatively limited. Mammoth remains in Pleistocene archaeological sites instead come mostly as ivory objects and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yajing Tian.

This is an abstract from the "Elephant Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Numerous ivories and ivory objects have been unearthed from eight pits found at the Sanxingdui site in Sichuan, China. These ivories and ivory objects can be roughly divided into three categories: buried objects, sacrificial utensils and decorations, which play different roles and functions in different scenes. The ivories with clear outlines placed on the upper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Thompson.

This is an abstract from the "Elephant Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Paleolithic record has many examples of elephant carcasses in association with stone tools. In some cases, there is further behavioral evidence of hominin exploitation in the form of cut marks, spatial distribution and representation of skeletal parts, and/or depositional context. Most analyses have focused on the quality of evidence for behavioral associations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jayc Sedlmayr.

This is an abstract from the "Elephant Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In numerous cultures human and non-human heads and their separable components have been revered as spiritually significant and as sacra used in ritual within “head (or skull) cults”; often considered as ensouled beings imbued with vital force. Potent elements of the head include soft-tissue structures such as eyes, tongue, the brain, and ears; skeletal structures...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Sanchez-Romero.

This is an abstract from the "Elephant Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The classic Middle Pleistocene localities of Ambrona and Torralba have been the center of multiple debates about Pleistocene behaviors, environments, and evolution. These two occurrences yielded numerous elephant bones and lithic artifacts, leading to its first interpretation as an elephant kill site, and provoking subsequent studies and debates about that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luman Jiang.

This is an abstract from the "Elephant Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the last century, a large number of water-saturated ivory have been unearthed from archaeological excavations at Sanxingdui and Jinsha sites in Sichuan, China. Due to the influence of burial environment, various diseases are extremely serious after excavation, and the preservation status is worrying, such as fracture, crisp powder and peeling. Instrumental...