Contemporaneity of Humans and Horses in the Southwest during the Pleistocene/Holocene Transition? New Radiocarbon Dates from Two Sites in Southern Arizona

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ventana Cave, AZ, and Murray Springs, AZ, have long been candidates for sites demonstrating spatial and temporal overlap between Paleoindians and extinct Pleistocene horses. However, this hypothesis has never before been tested using direct radiocarbon dating, rendering previous speculation ambiguous. AMS radiocarbon dates on horse bone from human occupation levels at these two sites provide insight into human-horse contemporaneity in the US Southwest during the end-Pleistocene. Compiling other radiocarbon dates on horse bone, we fit these new dates into a Bayesian summed probability distribution, providing a terminal date for horse persistence North America. This has considerable implications for hypotheses about megafaunal extinction in the Americas and provides new insights into the potential for human hunting of Equus in North America at the end of the last ice age.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37434.0