Complex Late Paleoindian Period Bifaces from Central America: Recent Findings from August Pine Ridge, Belize

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent and ongoing research at August Pine Ridge, Belize is documenting an astonishing assemblage of complex bifaces representing human occupation and social interactions that took place in Central America from approximately 13,000 to 8,000 years ago. As the Fluted Biface Horizon and the Pan-American production of such fluted bifaces ceased, we see new distinctive regional lithic technologies emerge in the Late Paleoindian and Early Archaic periods (ca. 12,000 – 8,000 years ago). Rather than ranges of thousands of kilometers of fluted biface technological behaviors, we observe these new and varied applications in ranges of hundreds of kilometers or less. Key research goals of the Pine Ridge Preceramic Project include the documentation and analysis of at least five under-studied or completely novel biface morphologies. With scores of lithic specimens recovered locally from the August Pine Ridge area available for study, we endeavor to advance new diagnostic elements in order to group various “types”, and show possible developmental progressions among similar morphologies. We additionally propose evidence of these technological behaviors being shared among the Early Holocene occupants of Northern Belize and other areas of Northern South America, Central America, and the Caribbean.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51305