Megafauna 101 for Archaeologists

Summary

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

The Pleistocene... basically a no-man's land that is trapped between the disciplines of archaeology and paleontology when it comes to the animals that inhabited that period. For American archaeologists, these animals are sometimes too old to be considered as having archaeological connotations. For Paleontologists, these are not fossils and, by some paleontologists' standards, are considered too young for paleontological studies. It is important for archaeologists to understand these animals and their environmental niches. This paper will focus on bison, mammoth, the occasional sabre cat, and a few other species that have been found in archaeological contexts. Using field examples from Colorado, Iowa, North Dakota, and Wyoming, the remains of these animals can be used to ascertain the environment that each lived in and in doing so these data can be used to widen the studies of the prehistoric environment in which the earliest of humankind in the Americas.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23291