2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part I

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Emslie.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many cave deposits in the western U.S. are rich in late Pleistocene vertebrate fossils and plant remains preserved in sediments and packrat middens. These caves are usually deep, dry, and located in arid environments where preservation and mummification of organic remains is highest. Many of these same caves were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Kelly.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The timing and nature of terminal Pleistocene colonization of the western hemisphere is central to the career of David Meltzer. In 1988, as young, wet-behind-the-ears professionals, we presented a narrative model to explain several facets of early Paleoindian archaeology: the nature of faunal processing, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donald Grayson.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This year’s Fryxell Award, for general interdisciplinary contributions to archaeology, has gone to David J. Meltzer. Perhaps the quickest introduction to the breadth, depth, power, and focus of Dr. Meltzer’s contributions in this realm is provided by his 2015 book, The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Widga.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The last few decades in the Quaternary sciences have seen impressive leaps in the development of novel tools and techniques, as well as excellent examples of interdisciplinary research in pursuit of archaeological objectives. From ancient DNA found in skeletons and sediments to an almost dizzying variety of stable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Mann.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the ice age, was the Mammoth Steppe the planet’s largest terrestrial biome or a giant weed patch? At times during the last ice age (Marine Isotope Stages 2-4, ca. 15,000-70,000 years ago), the Mammoth Steppe extended from Iberia to the southern Yukon. One peculiarity of the Mammoth Steppe as a biome is that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vance Holliday.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Traveling and working with Dave Meltzer for 40 years has been an adventure and learning experience. We first met working together on Archaic sites—to which we have returned later in our careers . Since then, we have reinvestigated Paleoindian sites, such as Lindenmeier, Midland, Miami, Black Mountain, Folsom, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Speth.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hunting terrestrial mammals is an unpredictable enterprise, with boom periods interspersed with periods of poor returns. Lack of success can arise for many reasons: scarcity of animals or difficulty finding them; failing to get close enough for an effective shot; animals are in poor condition; communal drives...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Metin Eren.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paleoindian archaeologists often suggest that overshot flakes, or a high frequency of overshot flakes, in lithic assemblages is characteristic or indicative of Clovis technology. Here, we present overshot flake frequency data recorded from Siberian, Folsom, and Archaic assemblages. We then compare these data to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only María Nieves Zedeño.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. David Meltzer’s discovery of a wellfield with over 60 wells at the Mustang Springs Site, Martin County, Texas points to survivance strategies deployed by mobile hunter-gatherers to manage harsh drought conditions during the Holocene Thermal Maximum (HTM). These wells, which date approximately to 6800 bp, attest to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason LaBelle.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Herein we follow the trail of David J. Meltzer, who for the past 40 years blazed a distinct path through the Clovis and Folsom archaeological record. And though some of this is well-trodden territory, David foraged new insights regarding these ancient peoples through his historical scholarship, interdisciplinary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Thomas.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> Paleoindians <u>buried </u>Spirit Cave Man in a Nevada cave and archaeologists excavated these remains in 1940. The Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe filed a NAGPRA claim requesting repatriation of the Spirit Cave ancestor they call The Storyteller. After a two-decade legal impasse, the tribe made the...