Mammoth and Mastodons….They are what’s for Dinner

Summary

The Pleistocene…basically a no-man’s time that is stuck between the disciplines of archaeology and paleontology when it comes to the animals that inhabited that period of time. For American archaeologists, they are often old, sometimes too old to consider them as having archaeological connotations. For Paleontologists, these are not fossils and by some paleontologist’s standards are considered too young for paleontological studies. It is important to archaeologists to understand these animals and the role that they played on the landscape. In doing so these animals shape the human condition by causing adjustments in environmental niches that the humans hunt and function in. Each of these large now-extinct animals, mammoth, mastodons, camelops, and many others had their particularly environmental needs. Using field examples from Iowa, Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming the remains of these animals can be used to ascertain the environment that each lived in and in doing so this data can be used to widen the studies of the prehistoric environment in which you find the earliest of humankind in the Americas.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage