Elephant-Hunting with D. Stanford

Summary

Dennis Stanford’s work at the Dutton, Selby, Lamb Spring, and Inglewood sites was a major part of his lifelong search for breakthrough evidence about North America’s earliest human encounters with mammoths. He encouraged me to study the megafaunal bones from those sites, and gave me room to disagree with him. His support allowed me to start looking into new ways to understand how the bones were modified and how such sites came to be. This presentation ties together data from those fossil sites with results of my actualistic research on megafaunal bones, starting with carnivore feedings at the National Zoo, and moving on to field studies of modern bonesites in North America, Australia, and Africa. Thanks to Dennis, critically important lessons have been learned about megafaunal bone assemblages. For example, we know that noncultural processes can spirally break proboscidean bones in ways that may be mistaken for human-caused fracturing, and that mortality profiles of multi-mammoth assemblages may reflect causes of death. Mammoths and other proboscideans feature prominently in debates about the evolution of human abilities to exploit large mammals, and Dennis Stanford has done much to advance the state of our knowledge.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 18840