Reexamining Early Foraging Occupations of High-Altitude Plateaux

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Early Human Dynamics in Arid and Mountain Environments of the Americas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 2006, Aldenderfer reviewed evidence of human occupations of the world’s high-altitude plateau regions (Ethiopia, Tibet, and the Andean Altiplano), noting the deleterious effects of living at high-altitudes: hypoxia, extreme cold stress, and low primary productivity of ecological systems. Aldenderfer argues that in these three high plateau regions with robust signatures of early human occupations, foragers did not exploit these areas until late in the Pleistocene or early in the Holocene because of the relative difficulty these environments would have presented to foraging peoples. In this paper, I update Aldenderfer’s review of early human occupations of high-altitude plateaus across the world, providing new data concerning the earliest habitations of these regions. I arrive at new conclusions concerning the marginality of these locales, generally finding that biological and cultural adaptations to living at high-altitude were developing earlier than previously understood. Moreover, I argue for a reconceptualization of what it means for these regions to be called marginal - a conceptualization based on archaeological data that offers more credence to the idea that high-altitude plateaus can actually be preferred environments for foraging populations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Early Human Dynamics in Arid and Mountain Environments of the Americas

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51160