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Publications (24)
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Personal ornaments are widely viewed as indicators of social identity and personhood. Ornaments are ubiquitous from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene, but they are most often found as isolated objects within archaeological assemblages without direct evidence on how they were displayed. This article presents a detailed record of the...
Cooking is one way that hunter gatherers maximize the energetic and nutritional outputs of their diets, and the benefits of cooking are clear for many foods, but cooking is labor intensive, and most foods can be consumed raw. Nutritional studies show that cooking eggs dramatically increases the bioavailability of the protein they contain, thus once...
We present 3D electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) imaging of the archaeological deposits at Arma Veirana cave (northern Italy), to date only partially explored. The archaeological importance of the cave is due to the presence of a rich Mousterian layer, traces of Late Upper Palaeolithic (Epigravettian) temporary occupations and an Early Mesolit...
The evolution and development of human mortuary behaviors is of enormous cultural significance. Here we report a richly-decorated young infant burial (AVH-1) from Arma Veirana (Liguria, northwestern Italy) that is directly dated to 10,211–9910 cal BP (95.4% probability), placing it within the early Holocene and therefore attributable to the early M...
The Greater Cape Floristic Region of South Africa was critical to the evolution of early modern humans (Homo sapiens) during the Pleistocene. The now submerged continental shelf formed its own ecosystem, the Palaeo-Agulhas Plain (PAP), where early humans lived and foraged. Grazing animals living on the plain might have migrated east and west tracki...
Chemical characterization of cryptotephra is critical for temporally linking archaeological sites. Here, we describe cryptotephra investigations of two Middle–Upper Paleolithic sites from north‐west Italy, Arma Veirana and Riparo Bombrini. Cryptotephra are present as small (<100 µm) rhyolitic glass shards at both sites, with geochemical signatures...
Faunal remains play an important role in helping reconstruct Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer subsistence and mobility strategies. However, differential bone preservation is an issue in southern European prehistoric sites, which often makes morphological identification impossible. Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) is a new, low-cost method th...
Trampling experiments have previously been undertaken to describe post-depositional effects on faunal remains. Few taphonomic experiments have looked at ostrich eggshell, despite its frequency at archaeological sites in Africa and Eurasia. This experiment seeks to fill some of the gaps in taphonomic knowledge by determining the effects of trampling...
Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1 (KEH-1) demonstrates varying human occupation over the course of multiple ocean transgressions and regressions in the late Middle Stone Age and early Later Stone Age (46,000 to 18,000 Cal BP). The position of the sites on the shallow South African coastal shelf offered occupants potential access to riverine, coastal, and...
This chapter explores the taphonomy and zooarchaeology of two archaeological levels from Pech IV (Levels I2 and Y-Z, corresponding to Layers 4B–4C and Layer 8, respectively, in the current excavations) that were excavated by Bordes from 1970 to 1977. The analyses described here were specifically geared toward (1) documenting the extent of post-depo...
KEH-1 is a coastal site preserving occupation sequences from the Middle to Later Stone Age transition (46,000 to 18,000 Cal BP), offers a unique glimpse into forager technology, subsistence, and mobility. During this period, coastal distance changed dramatically – from less than 5 km to about 75km distant, and the available terrestrial fauna and su...
Cryptotephra are small glass volcanic shards (<80 micron) that occur invisibly in sediments and can be used to create precise isochrons (time datums) in archaeological sites. We identified cryptotephra at Arma Veirana (AV), a Middle and Upper Paleolithic archaeological site approximately 14 km from the Mediterranean coast in Liguria, Italy. The sha...
The location of Bulgaria on the Balkan Peninsula
makes it potentially important for evaluating biogeographic
hypotheses related to human evolution. The country
lies at the crossroads of Europe and Asia Minor and
constitutes a key portion of one of the possible dispersal
pathways that hominin populations would have employed
as they entered and left...
Experiment in difference of observed cut marks from long bones of Capra and Ovis carcasses between butchering hung up or on the ground.
The location of Bulgaria on the Balkan Peninsula makes it potentially important for evaluating biogeographic hypotheses related to human evolution. The country lies at the crossroads of Europe and Asia Minor and constitutes a key portion of one of the possible dispersal pathways that hominin populations would have employed as they entered and left...
Neandertals disappeared from Europe just after 40,000 years ago. Some hypotheses ascribe this to numerous population crashes associated with glacial cycles in the late Pleistocene. The goal of this paper is to test the hypothesis that glacial periods stressed Neandertal populations. If cold climates stressed Neandertals, their subsistence behaviors...
The problem of Mousterian interassemblage variability is fundamental because it affects our models about social, technological and economic organization of Middle Paleolithic hominins. Particularly controversial is the issue of whether this variability reflects a chronological succession of industries or differences in ethnicity, site function, too...
Using a number of Middle and Late Pleistocene sites with good evidence for fire, Roebroeks and Villa (1) argued that the habitual use of fire did not become part of hominin technological repertoires until the latter half of the Middle Pleistocene. We are pleased to see other researchers taking a more critical view of the nature and quality of the a...