Geology Lecture: The Case for Humans Hunting Ice Age Animals in Eastern Oregon 18,000 Years Ago скачать в хорошем качестве

Geology Lecture: The Case for Humans Hunting Ice Age Animals in Eastern Oregon 18,000 Years Ago

Rimrock Draw Rockshelter (35HA3855) is a small and shallow rockshelter located in Harney County, Oregon at the north edge of the Great Basin. Situated in wide-open sagebrush steppe country, the location looks much like a thousand other nearby places where one might expect to find stone tools dating from the mid- to late-Holocene. However, the archaeological record at this site ends around 7,000 years ago, shortly after the cataclysmic eruption that formed Crater Lake from Mount Mazama, and human occupation of the site begins much earlier. Dates of 18,000 to 17,000 years before present have been obtained through high precision Accelerator Mass Spectrometry radiocarbon assays (AMS14C) on Camelops and Bison tooth enamel fragments collected from deeply buried archaeological deposits. The teeth are associated with stone tools and chipping debris indicating human contemporaneity at the site. Other evidence suggests that several genera of Pleistocene herbivores were butchered and consumed there. This presentation will include an overview of fieldwork at the rockshelter to contextualize the provenience of the dated enamel fragments.