Discerning Paleolithic Places Rather Than Pleistocene Palimpsests: Olival Grande and the Early Upper Paleolithic in Central Portugal

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The expansive, open-air archaeological site of Olival Grande contains the earliest, well-dated Upper Paleolithic assemblage known from the Rio Maior vicinity. Fabric analysis, sedimentology, and geochemistry studies detail manifold site burial mechanisms, very slow rates of deposition, and significant post-depositional processes at the hillslope site. This presentation uses data from intra-site spatial patterns, lithic technological organization, and artifact fracture patterns and surfaces to hypothesize a long-term view of forager technological organization and interaction with place. The archaeology of Olival Grande demonstrates interpretive limitations of the palimpsest concept, a designation which in practice often conflates and confounds cultural and geological processes of site formation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25645