Lorena Becerra-Valdivia

University of Bristol & Linacre College (University of Oxford)

Found in 1968, the archaeological site of Anzick, Montana, contains the only known Clovis burial. Here, the partial remains of a male infant, Anzick-1, were found in association with a Clovis assemblage of over 100 lithic and osseous artifacts—all red-stained with ochre. The incomplete, unstained cranium of an unassociated, geologically younger ind...

The Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition is often linked with a bio-cultural shift involving the dispersal of modern humans outside of Africa, the concomitant replacement of Neanderthals across Eurasia, and the emergence of new technological traditions. The Zagros Mountains region assumes importance in discussions concerning this period as its ge...

Understandings of spatiotemporal dispersals of Homo sapiens onto the neotropical South American landscape and their environmental interactions during the late Pleistocene to late Holocene are being refined by multidisciplinary archaeological research. The Sabana of Bogota region in Colombia hosts a concentration of occupational sites, including Teq...

Prehistoric Polynesian voyaging into high latitudes with landfall in Antarctica remains a widely credited proposition. We examine it through archaeological and environmental evidence from the Subantarctic region of the southwest Pacific, focussing upon an extensive archaeological site at Sandy Bay on Enderby Island. Combining a new set of radiocarb...

While recent genomic and isotopic information show that migration has been pervasive along human history, southern Andean archaeology has largely overlooked its importance in shaping human trajectories of sociocultural change. Building on previous isotopic research that identified the presence of migrant farmers in the Uspallata Valley (Mendoza, Ar...

In this article, the authors present an analysis of radiocarbon dates from a stratified deposit at the Greek Geometric period settlement of Zagora on the island of Andros, which are among the few absolute dates measured from the period in Greece. The dates assigned to Greek Geometric ceramics are based on historical and literary evidence and are fo...

Evidence from bay floor channelling, seismic surveys and core dating has been used to suggest that Port Phillip Bay dried out for a period between about 2800 and 1000 cal. yr BP as sandbars blocked it off from the sea. This model is now supported by the examination of radiocarbon ages from archaeological excavations of Aboriginal shell middens on t...

Radiocarbon dating was developed by Willard Libby in the late 1940s. It is a scientific method that takes advantage of the radioactive isotope of carbon to determine the age of carbonaceous material. Radiocarbon continues to be the main dating method in archaeology. This chapter provides a brief outline of the radiocarbon dating method and discusse...

The timing and character of the Pleistocene peopling of the Americas are measured by the discovery of unequivocal artifacts from well-dated contexts. We report the discovery of a well-dated artifact assemblage containing 14 stemmed projectile points from the Cooper's Ferry site in western North America, dating to ~16,000 years ago. These stemmed po...

The initial peopling of the remote Pacific islands was one of the greatest migrations in human history, beginning three millennia ago by Lapita cultural groups. The spread of Lapita out of an ancestral Asian homeland is a dominant narrative in the origins of Pacific peoples, and although Island New Guinea has long been recognized as a springboard f...

Significance Red ocher (also known as hematite) is relatively common in Paleoindian sites exceeding ca. 11,000 calibrated years B.P. in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains of North America. Red ocher fulfilled a wide range of functions within Paleoindian societies, as indicated by its association with graves, caches, campsites, hide-working implem...

Wetland sediments are valuable archives of environmental change but can be challenging to date. Terrestrial macrofossils are often sparse, resulting in radiocarbon ( ¹⁴ C) dating of less desirable organic fractions. An alternative approach for capturing changes in atmospheric ¹⁴ C is the use of terrestrial microfossils. We ¹⁴ C date pollen microfos...

Cuchipuy is an archaeological site within the ancient Laguna de Tagua Tagua area (O’Higgins Region, central Chile; known for containing the remains of extinct fauna), with evidence for cultural activity spanning most of the Holocene, including over 50 human burials. The bulk of chronometric work at Cuchipuy was carried out in the 1980s, where a dis...

Recent excavations by the Ancient Southwest Texas Project of Texas State University sampled a previously undocumented Younger Dryas component from Eagle Cave in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas. This stratified assemblage consists of bison ( Bison antiquus ) bones in association with lithic artifacts and a hearth. Bayesian modeling yields an ag...

The Chronos ¹⁴ Carbon-Cycle Facility is a new radiocarbon laboratory at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Built around an Ionplus 200 kV MIni-CArbon DAting System (MICADAS) Accelerator Mass Spectrometer (AMS) installed in October 2019, the facility was established to address major challenges in the Earth, Environmental and Archaeologica...

The initial colonization of the Americas remains a highly debated topic¹, and the exact timing of the first arrivals is unknown. The earliest archaeological record of Mexico—which holds a key geographical position in the Americas—is poorly known and understudied. Historically, the region has remained on the periphery of research focused on the firs...

The peopling of the Americas marks a major expansion of humans across the planet. However, questions regarding the timing and mechanisms of this dispersal remain, and the previously accepted model (termed ‘Clovis-first’)—suggesting that the first inhabitants of the Americas were linked with the Clovis tradition, a complex marked by distinctive flut...

The initial colonization of the Americas remains a highly debated topic1, and the exact timing of the first arrivals is unknown. The earliest archaeological record of Mexico—which holds a key geographical position in the Americas—is poorly known and understudied. Historically, the region has remained on the periphery of research focused on the firs...

Manning builds an inappropriate Bayesian age model to assert that the initial occupation at Cooper’s Ferry began only ~15,935 ± 75 to 15,130 ± 20 cal yr B.P., suggesting that our estimation of ~16,560 to 15,280 cal yr B.P. is unsupported. However, this analysis both ignores evidence of human occupation from the earliest undated cultural deposits an...

For decades, researchers have employed sets of radiocarbon dates to reconstruct trends in ancient human populations. The overarching assumption in this analysis is that the frequency of dates is proportional to the magnitude of past human activity. Thus, the distribution of summed or otherwise summarized dates is used to extrapolate population dens...

The early occupation of America The Cooper's Ferry archaeological site in western North America has provided evidence for the pattern and time course of the early peopling of the Americas. Davis et al. describe new evidence of human activity from this site, including stemmed projectile points. Radiocarbon dating and Bayesian analysis indicate an ag...

Supplementary material for Davis et al. (2019) Science paper "Late Upper Paleolithic occupation at Cooper’s Ferry, Idaho, USA, ~16,000 years ago"

Complex processes in the settling of the Americas The expansion into the Americas by the ancestors of present day Native Americans has been difficult to tease apart from analyses of present day populations. To understand how humans diverged and spread across North and South America, Moreno-Mayar et al. sequenced 15 ancient human genomes from Alaska...

Kaldar Cave is a key archaeological site that provides evidence of the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition in Iran. Excavations at the site in 2014–2015 led to the discovery of cultural remains generally associated with anatomically modern humans (AMHs) and evidence of a probable Neanderthal- made industry in the basal layers. Attempts have bee...