Doing Great Basin archaeology recently: Coping with variability

Great Basin archaeologists spent the 1970s and most of the 1980s tearing down the Desert Culture hypothesis without presenting compelling means for dealing with the empirical variability that made it untenable. Recent research seeks to understand this variability by examining the effect of key variables in extreme environmental contexts, especially in wetlands and at high altitudes, and by developing and refining models of optimality that anticipate variability as the local expression of general evolutionary ecological principles. Research on intraregional and ethnic variability has lagged behind—the former because it is said to be costly, the latter because it is problematical in theory.     

The Terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene archaeology of the Great Basin

The archaeological record of the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene in the Great Basin consists largely of surface lithic artifacts, and consequently research has concentrated on typological and technological studies. The small suite of radiocarbon dates available suggests human presence in the Great Basin by at least 11,500 B.P., but evidence of subsistence is scanty. Technological analyses as well as artifact distributions suggest that the earliest occupants of this region subsisted primarily by hunting, possibly large terrestrial game. As elsewhere in North America, the earliest occupants of the Great Basin faced a rapidly changing environment, with the drying of shallow pluvial lake remnants and the creation of new habitats. Paralleling these changes, significant subsistence resource diversification coupled with expansion into new environments is evident by the close of the Pleistocene.     

Paleoindian technological provisioning strategies in the northwestern Great Basin

Great Basin populations during the Pleistocene–Holocene Transition (PHT) are often characterized as being mobile and focused on wetlands; however, the factors that influenced where Paleoindians selected residential campsites are poorly understood. Using predictions derived from optimal foraging-based patch choice models and GIS reconstructions of the PHT landscape, some researchers have argued that occupations in smaller wetlands should have been shorter than occupations in larger wetlands but such arguments have rarely been evaluated using empirical data. The PHT lithic record provides an opportunity to evaluate the relationship between wetland size and occupation span by applying Kuhn's (1995) concept of technological provisioning. Kuhn expects more mobile populations to provision individuals and more sedentary populations to provision places and suggests that: (1) a strategy of provisioning individuals should be reflected by a high proportion of more extensively used artifacts made on non-local raw materials; and (2) a strategy of provisioning places should be reflected by a high proportion of less extensively used artifacts made on local raw materials. We apply the technological provisioning concept to lithic assemblages from two of the Parman localities, extensive PHT sites in the northwestern Great Basin, and compare local and nonlocal artifacts to determine if Paleoindians shifted from provisioning individuals while moving to/from the sites to provisioning the place while occupying them. There is no relationship between artifact transport distance and artifact use intensity. We interpret these findings as evidence that Paleoindians did not alter their provisioning strategies while occupying the Parman localities, likely because occupations were brief within a small wetland poorly-suited to support groups for long periods.     

Hunter-gatherer cultural dynamics: Long- and short-term trends in Australian prehistory

Recent evidence indicates that a wide range of environmental sectors of Greater Australia had been peopled between ca. 30,000 and ca. 40,000 B.P. Differences in regional Pleistocene patterns of settlement, subsistence, and demography are becoming increasingly evident—such as those between central arid Australia and sub-Antarctic Tasmania. It now remains to model and explain the extremely long-term Pleistocene cultural sequences (spanning tens of thousands of years), in contrast to the more short-term cultural sequences that characterize, for example, the mid-late Holocene period of mainland Australia. While explanations remain unresolved, the latter period indicates the widest range of regional sociocultural and demographic changes.     

Holocene prehistory of the northernmost north Pacific

We examine evidence for Holocene contact between Asia and North America across what is now the Bering Strait, emphasizing maritime adaptation. After 10,000 B.P. residual influence of the Siberian Paleolithic is clear, and derivative Americans were moving southward along the open Pacific coast and settling in the eastern Aleutian Islands. By 6000 B.P. maritime adaptation is evident in the Kodiak Island region, and expansion westward brought colonization of the entire Aleutian chain of islands before 3000 B.P. In Asia there was marine subsistence on Hokkaido by 6000 B.P, but in the lower Amur River region, the southern and northern regions of the Okhotsk Sea, the coast of Kamchatka, and the Chukchi Peninsula no major maritime interest can be dated until after 2700 or even 2500 B.P In north Alaska, the mainland was cut off from Siberia by 6000 B.P with the rise of postglacial seas, but contact was reestablished 5000 B.P at the cultural level of the nonmaritime Siberian Neolithic. Pronounced marine orientation appears intrusively in north Alaska somewhat before 3000 B.P, when the only known source for the technology was the region extending from the Gulf of Alaska through the Aleutian Islands. Thereafter developed the maritime culture of the historic Eskimo people.     

Rocks are heavy: transport costs and Paleoarchaic quarry behavior in the Great Basin

Central place foraging models are used to investigate assemblage variability at two Paleoarchaic (terminal Pleistocene/early Holocene) dacite quarries in the central and eastern Great Basin. Our analyses focus specifically on biface reduction and how varying degrees of reduction relate to the costs of transporting the resulting products upon departing the quarry. Our results suggest that when the distance to be traveled to a residential base is great, reduction will proceed further at the quarry than if the residential base is fairly close. Further, a residential site assemblage will consist of bifaces at later stages of reduction than its associated quarry.     

Interpretation of observed fluid potential patterns in a deep sedimentary basin under tectonic compression: Hungarian Great Plain, Pannonian Basin

The ≈ 40 000 km² Hungarian Great Plain portion of the Pannonian Basin consists of a basin fill of 100 m to more than 7000 m thick semi‐ to unconsolidated marine, deltaic, lacustrine and fluviatile clastic sediments of Neogene age, resting on a strongly tectonized Pre‐Neogene basement of horst‐and‐graben topography of a relief in excess of 5000 m. The basement is built of a great variety of brittle rocks, including flysch, carbonates and metamorphics. The relatively continuous Endr?d Aquitard, with a permeability of less than 1 md (10^?15 m²) and a depth varying between 500 and 5000 m, divides the basin's rock framework into upper and lower sequences of highly permeable rock units, whose permeabilities range from a few tens to several thousands of millidarcy. Subsurface fluid potential and flow fields were inferred from 16 192 water level and pore pressure measurements using three methods of representation: pressure–elevation profiles; hydraulic head maps; and hydraulic cross‐sections. Pressure–elevation profiles were constructed for eight areas. Typically, they start from the surface with a straight‐line segment of a hydrostatic gradient (γ_st = 9.8067 MPa km^?1) and extend to depths of 1400–2500 m. At high surface elevations, the gradient is slightly smaller than hydrostatic, while at low elevations it is slightly greater. At greater depths, both the pressures and their vertical gradients are uniformly superhydrostatic. The transition to the overpressured depths may be gradual, with a gradient of γ_dyn = 10–15 MPa km^?1 over a vertical distance of 400–1000 m, or abrupt, with a pressure jump of up to 10 MPa km^?1 over less than 100 m and a gradient of γ_dyn > 20 MPa km^?1. According to the hydraulic head maps for 13 100–500 m thick horizontal slices of the rock framework, the fluid potential in the near‐surface domains declines with depth beneath positive topographic features, but it increases beneath depressions. The approximate boundary between these hydraulically contrasting regions is the 100 m elevation contour line in the Duna–Tisza interfluve, and the 100–110 m contours in the Nyírség uplands. Below depths of ≈ 600 m, islets of superhydrostatic heads develop which grow in number, areal extent and height as the depth increases; hydraulic heads may exceed 3000 m locally. A hydraulic head ‘escarpment’ appears gradually in the elevation range of ? 1000 to ? 2800 m along an arcuate line which tracks a major regional fault zone striking NE–SW: heads drop stepwise by several hundred metres, at places 2000 m, from its north and west sides to the south and east. The escarpment forms a ‘fluid potential bank’ between a ‘fluid potential highland’ (500–2500 m) to the north and west, and a ‘fluid potential basin’ (100–500 m) to the south and east. A ‘potential island’ rises 1000 m high above this basin further south. According to four vertical hydraulic sections, groundwater flow is controlled by the topography in the upper 200–1700 m of the basin; the driving force is orientated downwards beneath the highlands and upwards beneath the lowlands. However, it is directed uniformly upwards at greater depths. The transition between the two regimes may be gradual or abrupt, as indicated by wide or dense spacing of the hydraulic head contours, respectively. Pressure ‘plumes’ or ‘ridges’ may protrude to shallow depths along faults originating in the basement. The basement horsts appear to be overpressured relative to the intervening grabens. The principal thesis of this paper is that the two main driving forces of fluid flow in the basin are gravitation, due to elevation differences of the topographic relief, and tectonic compression. The flow field is unconfined in the gravitational regime, whereas it is confined in the compressional regime. The nature and geometry of the fluid potential field between the two regimes are controlled by the sedimentary and structural features of the rock units in that domain, characterized by highly permeable and localized sedimentary windows, conductive faults and fracture zones. The transition between the two potential fields can be gradual or abrupt in the vertical, and island‐like or ridge‐like in plan view. The depth of the boundary zone can vary between 400 and 2000 m. Recharge to the gravitational regime is inferred to occur from infiltrating precipitation water, whereas that to the confined regime is from pore volume reduction due to the basement's tectonic compression.     

The Fremont Complex: A Behavioral Perspective

The Fremont complex is composed of farmers and foragers who occupied the Colorado Plateau and Great Basin region of western North America from about 2100 to 500 years ago. These people included both immigrants and indigenes who shared some material culture and symbolic attributes, but also varied in ways not captured by definitions of the Fremont as a shared cultural tradition. The complex reflects a mosaic of behaviors including full-time farmers, full-time foragers, part-time farmer/foragers who seasonally switched modes of production, farmers who switched to full-time foraging, and foragers who switched to full-time farming. Farming defines the Fremont, but only in the sense that it altered the matrix in which both farmers and foragers lived, a matrix which provided a variety of behavioral options to people pursuing an array of adaptive strategies. The mix of symbiotic and competitive relationships among farmers and between farmers and foragers presents challenges to detection in the archaeological record. Greater clarity results from use of a behavioral model which recognizes differing contexts of selection favoring one adaptive strategy over another. The Fremont is a case where the transition from foraging to farming is followed by a millennium of adaptive diversity and terminates with the abandonment of farming. As such, it serves as a potential comparison to other cases in the world during the early phases of the food producing transition.     

An inter-site comparison of enamel hypoplasia in bison: implications for paleoecology and modeling Late Plains Archaic subsistence

Bison bison mandibular molars from the Late Plains Archaic kill/butchery sites of Buffalo Creek (Wyoming) and Kaplan-Hoover (Colorado) exhibit significant frequencies of dental enamel hypoplasia (DEH), a defect believed to reflect information about physiological status of individual animals. This study provides a methodology to estimate the ontogenetic and seasonal timing of DEH formation in bison dentition. Integration of these estimates with data from bison life history and grassland ecology allows inferences on age- and season-specific factors exacerbating periodic physiological declines that were recorded in the form of enamel hypoplasias. Differences between assemblages indicate regional variability in grassland conditions, with data from Buffalo Creek pointing to recurrent drought that reduced forage capacity and contributed to physiological stress in bison over two consecutive years. Seasons of physiological stress reflected in the DEH correspond to each of the three kill events at the locality, suggesting that predictability of bison behavior in this location was a critical factor in influencing the seasonal timing and location of repeated hunting episodes. Unlike Buffalo Creek, timings of stress episodes are not consistent with season of death in the Kaplan-Hoover bison assemblage, suggesting that favorable grassland conditions were the primary factor influencing timing of this large single-kill event in order to provision for the upcoming winter. DEH analysis represents a developing approach in the construction of models addressing key aspects of local grassland and bison ecology as well as offers unique insights into the hunting strategies and subsistence decisions of Late Plains Archaic foragers.     

X-ray powder diffraction analysis of Late Holocene reservoir sediments

X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) analysis of clays from anthropogenic Late Holocene reservoir sediments can provide a paleoclimatic proxy. Illite and smectite are climate sensitive clay minerals and their relative amounts correlate with climatic episodes. Relative percent composition of clays in Late Holocene reservoir sediment is diagnostic of different mineral source areas and their hydraulic transport processes, which are climate controlled. Climosequences of clay minerals from Late Holocene reservoir sediments are correlative with magnetic susceptibility records and provide a relatively simple and cost-effective tool for gaining insight into paleoclimate.     

运河文化的运动规律及其启示

本通过对化定义的阐释,界定了运河化的理论内涵和表现形式,检讨了运河化兴衰枯荣的历史进程,揭示了运河化的运动规律及南水北调的重大意义。     

The use of forest resources in central Iberia during the Late Iron Age. Insights from the wood charcoal analysis of Pintia,a Vaccaean oppidum

Charred woods may be used to effectively reconstruct past wood acquisition strategies. We used anthracological data from the pre-Roman settlement of Pintia (Padilla de Duero, Valladolid) to examine the use of forest resources at the local scale. Palaeoecological data revealed heterogeneous landscapes in the inland northern meseta with environments that offered diverse sources of wood for the inhabitants of Pintia, one of the first cities of inland Iberia. Pines (Pinus pinea/pinaster and Pinus sylvestris/nigra) and both evergreen and deciduous Quercus L. and Juniperus L. were the main taxa identified as both fuelwood and construction elements, but the assemblages and frequencies of these taxa differed depending on their use. We also examined the potential of models from human ecology by considering the frequency, handling time and the relative technological value of each taxon to model how people gathered wood resources. The results suggest that although local availability affected the forest resources that were used by the Vaccaei people, specific taxa were positively selected for specific uses.     

Commentary. The Diseases of Alexander the Great

The accompanying articles that speculate that Alexander the Great had a traumatic carotid dissection or congenital cervical scoliosis demonstrate the difficulties in retrospective diagnosis as a historical enterprise. The extant primary sources were written centuries after Alexander’s death and are ambiguous in their original languages, and even more so in translation. Thus we cannot be certain what illness Alexander actually had. Furthermore, anachronistic diagnosis removes Alexander from the medical context of this time, telling us little of historical significance about him. Such investigations also illustrate the more general limits that the absence of context imposes on the study of ancient history.     

A Stone at the Siege of Cyropolis and the Death of Alexander the Great

Alexander the Great was struck by a stone at the Siege of Cyropolis in 329 BC and was rendered temporarily blind and inaudible as a result. Although other authors have written extensively about the likely pathological effects of this injury, none have suggested carotid artery dissection as a possible cause. We present evidence that this should be considered as a differential diagnosis and how it might explain an unusual symptom seen at his deathbed in Babylon six years later.     

Seasonal stability in Late Holocene shellfish harvesting on the central California coast

Oxygen isotope determinations from 92 California mussel (Mytilus californianus) shells from ten archaeological sites in central coastal California show relatively stable seasonal harvesting patterns between 3600 CAL BP and historic contact (AD 1769). Coastal occupants harvested mussels nearly year-round and seem to have occupied individual residential bases throughout the seasonal cycle. Interior groups returned with mussels from the coast mostly in the spring and early summer, but almost never in the late summer/early fall when nut crops were harvested. These findings suggest two inter-dependent groups with distinct seasonal settlement strategies: inland people, reliant on acorns and other nut crops harvested in the fall, and coastal inhabitants who were less involved with acorns. This pattern is supported by accounts recorded by the first Spanish explorers in AD 1769. While some interior groups may have been seasonally migrating “collectors,” coastal populations were less mobile, inhabiting individual residential sites throughout the year, albeit not necessarily on a permanent basis. These findings highlight the strong influence of coastal environments and resources on hunter-gatherer mobility.     

大遗址保护与考古遗址公园建设

建设考古遗址公园,是新时期大遗址保护新模式,是建设和谐社会和中华民族共同精神家园的重要举措。建设考古遗址公园的根本目的是保护遗址、服务考古。考古遗址公园建设必须科学规划,严肃论证,循序渐进,稳妥扎实。考古学家应积极支持考古遗址公园建设。文物管理部门应对考古遗址公园建设热情支持,善加引导,健全规章,严格管理。     

Middle Holocene Taphonomy and Paleozoology at the Prairie-Forest Border,the Itasca Bison Site,MN

The Itasca Bison site near the prairie-forest border in central Minnesota is important to understanding the cultural and ecological role of bison in the upper Midwest during the middle Holocene. Recent reanalyses of this assemblage support the original interpretation of a taphonomically complex, fluvially modified site. Despite this taphonmic complexity, the role of humans in the butchering and possible accumulation of some of the bison fauna is also supported, although not as the only mechanism of accumulation. The bison assemblage is slightly biased toward males, and seasonality estimates are spread throughout the year. New direct accelerator mass spectrometry dates indicate a minimum of two highly mixed depositional events: one at 7970–7790 cal B.P. and an earlier event between 8520 and 8180 cal B.P.     

Late Pleistocene to Early Holocene Plant Movements in Southern Kyushu, Japan

From the late Pleistocene to early Holocene in Japan, subtropical and temperate forest elements moved northwards. This affected human choices and access to food sources. More settled patterns of living spread northwards gradually, and northern hunting-gathering-fishing people began cultivating vegetables and cereal crops. This poster reports the presence of ancient starch residues on stone artefacts in Kagoshima Prefecture, southern Kyushu. The oldest residues recovered are dated by context to about 30,000 ¹⁴C yr BP. If such residues can be identified, it may be possible to detect a hypothesized early phase of tropical plant movement northwards during warmer climate peaks in the late terminal Pleistocene, as well as during the long period of Holocene warming that followed. As an initial step towards identification, the morphological characteristics and condition of the starch granules are described and compared to those of other sites in early Japan.