Is Human Presence Identifiable through the Spatial Composition of Proboscidean Bonebeds?

Summary

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

Across North America, there have been more than 75 proboscidean bonebeds with proposed evidence of human predation or scavenging (Grayson and Meltzer 2015). Only 14 of these sites are uncontested with strong evidence contributing to a collective agreement that these sites are indeed culturally associated (Grayson and Meltzer 2015). This leaves the vast majority of proboscidean bonebeds in a gray area with ambiguous evidence of human involvement and contested status. This research focuses on investigating human presence at proboscidean bonebeds across North America using a new method that statistically compares the spatial relationships between skeletal elements. For this study I selected 17 bonebeds that I georeferenced in QGIS, and for each, I analyzed skeletal completeness and dispersion using an algorithm I created in the R programming language. Results from this method suggest there are no strong indications of distinct spatial differences between a culturally associated and a natural proboscidean bonebed.

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): 52763