The Spore Conundrum: Does a Dung Fungus Decline Signal Humans’ Arrival in the Eastern US?
Author(s): Stuart Fiedel
Year: 2015
Summary
In pond sediments in Ohio, Indiana, and New York, Sporormiella (dung-fungus) spore declines at ca. 14,000 cal BP are followed first by charcoal particle peaks, and then dramatic shifts in tree pollen percentages. This sequence has been interpreted as the outcome of initial human predation on megafauna. New dates push "classic" Clovis back to ca. 13,500 cal BP, but this still leaves a 500-yr gap between the ecological signals and the earliest Paleoindian artifacts. How can this gap be explained?
SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.
Cite this Record
The Spore Conundrum: Does a Dung Fungus Decline Signal Humans’ Arrival in the Eastern US?. Stuart Fiedel. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 394956)
This Resource is Part of the Following Collections
Keywords
General
Clovis
•
Megafauna
•
Sporormiella
Geographic Keywords
North America - Northeast
Spatial Coverage
min long: -80.815; min lat: 39.3 ; max long: -66.753; max lat: 47.398 ;