Phytolith Analysis of Experimental Fires: Insights into the Prehistory of Fire

Summary

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

The Cooking Hypothesis suggests the morphological changes in the Homo lineage, including larger brains, were due to incorporating controlled combustion to cook food. Most archaeological evidence for fire comes from cave sites, which are less likely to be exposed to post-depositional processes (e.g. wind and water) that can destroy combustion evidence. Yet the majority of Early Pleistocene archaeological sites are in open-air contexts. Multi-proxy evidence is necessary for studying fire in open air contexts because of the equifinality between multiple types of combustion. Phytolith and chemical analyses are particularly useful proxies for studying controlled fire. To develop inferences of behavior from phytolith data requires extensive experimentation to provide expectations regarding the frequency and distribution of phytoliths in high intensity localized fires. We look at evidence left by modern experimental fires in a floodplain environment, similar to the environment at FxJj20 AB, a potential locality of hominin fire use in in the Okote Mbr (~1.5 Ma) of the Koobi Fora Fm (northern Kenya). Preliminary results confirm that sediment inside the fire contains the highest concentration of burnt phytoliths versus outside the fire and prevailing wind direction may explain the presence of burnt phytoliths outside the fire.

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): 25575