Devil’s Den (8LV84), Florida: Rare Earth Element (REE) Analysis Suggests Comtemporaneity Between Late Pleistocene Fauna and Human Skeletal Material

Summary

In the early 1960s, human remains of several individuals were found in association with late Pleistocene mammals during an excavation at Devil’s Den sinkhole in Levy County, Florida. The rarity of this occurrence in Florida and across the Americas is well-known. Very little has been published about the Devil’s Den site, and the human remains were not available for study until 2003. Neither the human or animals bones can be dated by the radiocarbon method due to a lack of sufficient surviving collagen. In this paper, the concentration levels and patterns of rare earth elements (REEs) in the bones are used to determine the relative antiquity of the remains.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage