Paleoproteomic Approach to Understanding Human Subsistence at the Late Upper Paleolithic Site of Ljubiceva Pecina (Istria, Croatia)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Research into the Late Pleistocene of Europe" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The region of Istria, today the largest Croatian peninsula, was a part of the Great Po region during the Late Pleistocene and therefore a big part of an intricate, now largely changed, ecosystem. The site of Ljubićeva pećina is one of many caves that played an important role for hunter-gatherer communities gravitating to this vast, and potentially fertile, plain. This rich site has a long stratigraphic sequence and, among other periods, bears evidence of human occupation at the very end of the Upper Paleolithic, approximately between 16 and 12 ka calBP.

Apart from traditional zooarchaeological analyses of the large faunal assemblage from trench B, a paleoproteomic approach to non-diagnostic osseous fragments is ongoing. Here we present the results of ZooMS analyses done so far in comparison to the available results of the morphological analyses. This gives us more data to get a better insight into behavioral patterns of these groups, such as planning, mobility and seasonality. Also, from a methodological point of view, we can asses how much and in what way the proteomic methods complement more traditional approach to faunal remains and, through estimation of collagen preservation, how they can be used in planning for further biomolecular analyses.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Interdisciplinary Research into the Late Pleistocene of Europe   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39280.0