Early Pleistocene Behavior and Archaeological Inference: Insights from Experiments

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The archaeology of human origins represents one of the key insights into what it means to be human. Despite this optimistic outlook, the archaeological record represents a dismally preserved record of untranslated objects. Archaeologists have become increasingly good at devising stories about the records of behaviors that our artifacts represent. However, the development of theoretical models to create expectations about the archaeological record are relatively lacking and poorly applied. As our field becomes increasingly quantitative, we unfortunately begin to focus on the microscopic components of the record with less applicability to broad understanding of behavior. Here I review a few models for how we can draw inference from the archaeological record using hypotheses about expectations of changes in the archaeological record. I describe how different types of “experiments,” whether they reflect knapping experiments or agent-based models of behavior, can provide guidance as where we can focus our efforts in the future. I draw from the archaeological record of the Pleistocene, specifically from the Turkana Basin, the Afar Basin, and the material record of the last million years in the Cape Floral region in South Africa.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Inference in Paleoarchaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33518