Search

The Antelope Springs Folsom locality is located near Trout Creek Pass, which connects South Park, a high elevation basin in the Rocky Mountains, with the headwaters region of the Arkansas River. Th...

During the Pleistocene Peopling of North America, the use of stone outcrops for forager gatherings would have provided Clovis colonizing hunter-gatherers with several advantages beyond that...

The transition from the atlatl to the bow and arrow happened numerous times in prehistory, and it often accompanied changes in socio-political complexity and labor organization. Recent work relying on longitudinal scores from recreational archery and atlatl competitions suggests that changes in socio-political complexity and labor organization arose due to between-technology differences in learning rates: bows take more time to master, and thus their benefits are not as easily obtained as those of atlatls. We discuss comparability issues with these recreational data sets. Additionally, we show that the learning curves underpinning this hypothesis do not account for inter-competitor variability in learning rates and that sources of uncertainty were omitted from the analysis. We use multilevel models to carry out an analysis of the score data that circumvents these problems. The multilevel models indicate that at best, the modern recreational data are consistent with similarly modest score gains for both technologies. These modest gains are probably unrelated to learning

After a 20-year hiatus (1955–1975) during which few archaeologists discussed fluoride dating, the method again received attention in the 1980s and 1990s when some argued for its validity. As a dating method, fluoride dating depends on the rate at which fluorine ions replace hydroxyl ions in osseous tissue. The rate of replacement is influenced by the properties of the skeletal part (SP), sediment chemistry (K), and sediment hydrology (H), and the replacement rate influences estimates of time. Calibrated AMS radiocarbon assays of 10 black bear (Ursus americanus) femora from a natural-trap cave in central Missouri are weakly correlated with fluorine concentrations, determined by neutron activation analysis in the 10 femora. Despite minimal variation in SP, K, and H, results indicate fluoride dating can be considered a valid dating method only in cases when the chronological validity of its results are confirmed with independent chronometric data. As similarities in fluorine amounts across specimens ...