Hominin land use of and movement in the Koobi Fora Formation (Kenya)

Summary

The occurrence of large densities of lithic and fossil material in Early Pleistocene contexts have been the focus of much interest. Several hypotheses modeling hominin foraging strategies have been generated to explain their formation. Assemblage formation is often hypothesized to be the result of particular land use strategies that relate to the movement and discard of stone artifacts. These hypotheses are difficult to test because they rely on ethnographic models of human movement, yet they are applied to assemblages that reflect millennia of time averaged behaviors. Assemblage level measures such as the volume ratio, cortex ratio, and flake to core ratios are useful tools for quantifying the movement of different components of lithic assemblages largely because they require a time averaged signal to describe patterns of movement in hominin behavior. To quantitatively test these hypotheses, we generate theoretically grounded expectations for these assemblage level measures in the context of various foraging strategies. We apply these measures across a series of Early Pleistocene archaeological localities in the Okote Member (1.6-1.39 Ma) of the Koobi Fora Formation to test these hypotheses against this archaeological record. This research was supported by the NSF Internation Research Experience for Students (OISE-1358178 and 1358200).

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 17234