A Thermoregulatory Perspective on the Folsom Archaeological Record

Summary

Human cold intolerance unambiguously suggests that mid to high latitude prehistoric foragers used thermoregulatory technologies, such as clothing and housing, to cope with the environment, even if archaeologists rarely find them in the record. Others have recognized this, but none have developed a formal means of expressing variation in thermal technologies in the archaeological record over widespread temperature clines. I draw from observations collected during ethnoarchaeological fieldwork with the Mongolian Dukha reindeer herders to understand the material correlates for thermal technologies. I then present an analysis of 53 published Folsom archaeological assemblages to test the notion that phenomena associated with thermoregulation, such as end scrapers and houses, become more abundant in colder environments. I make the case that my results have widespread implications for understanding variation in forager archaeological sites independent of and complementary to subsistence-based interpretive frameworks.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20813