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ABSTRACT Over the last several decades, scholars have reexamined the importance of spatiality to human life and argued that space produces and is produced by social relationships. This article adopts such a relational understanding of space to examine the production of eco‐archaeological tourist attractions in the eastern Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and beyond. Specifically, this article considers the common practice of declaring areas encompassing archaeological sites as nature parks or wildernesses. Because so many sites are currently located in areas that have been deemed natural, scholars cannot fully understand the contemporary production of archaeological space without examining the historic production of nature and wilderness. Using the Xcaret Eco‐Archaeological Park and the Otoch Ma'ax Yetel Kooh, this article shows that although the creation of archaeological nature parks frequently harms indigenous peoples through processes of spatial colonization and spatial commodification, the production of such spaces can also enable and empower local, marginalized groups. [wilderness, political authority social inequality, community archaeology, the Maya]
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Antarctica as a ‘natural laboratory’ for the critical assessment of the archaeological validity of early stone tool sites
Lithic technologies dominate understanding of early humans, yet natural processes can fracture rock in ways that resemble artefacts made by Homo sapiens and other primates. Differentiating between fractures made by natural processes and primates is important for assessing the validity of early and controversial archaeological sites. Rather than depend on expert authority or intuition, the authors propose a null model of conchoidally fractured Antarctic rocks. As no primates have ever occupied the continent, Antarctica offers a laboratory for generating samples that could only have been naturally fractured. Examples that resemble artefacts produced by primates illustrate the potential of ‘archaeological’ research in Antarctica for the evaluation of hominin sites worldwide.
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- PAR ID:
- 10404819
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Antiquity
- ISSN:
- 0003-598X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 11
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract. For nearly 3 decades, geodetic Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) measurements in Antarctica have provided direct observations of bedrock displacement, which is linked to various geodynamic processes, including plate motion, post-seismic deformation, and glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA). Previous geodynamic studies in Antarctica, especially those pertaining to GIA, have been constrained by the limited availability of GNSS data. This is due to the fact that GNSS data are collected by a wide range of institutions and network operators, with the raw observational data either not publicly available or scattered across various repositories. Further, the metadata necessary for rigorous data processing have often not been available or reliable. Consequently, the potential of GNSS observations for geodynamic studies in Antarctica has not been fully exploited yet. Here, we present consistently processed coordinate time series for GNSS sites in Antarctica and the sub-Antarctic region for the time span from 1995 to 2021. The data set is composed of 286 continuous and episodic sites, with 258 sites having a time span longer than 3 years. The coordinate time series were obtained from a combination of four independent processing solutions using different GNSS software and products, allowing the identification of inconsistencies in individual solutions. From these, we infer a reliable and robust combined solution. A key issue was the thorough reassessment of station metadata to minimise artefacts and biases in the coordinate time series. The resulting data set provides coordinate time series with unprecedented spatiotemporal coverage, promising significant advancements in future geodynamic studies in Antarctica. The data set is freely available at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.967515 (Buchta et al., 2024a).more » « less
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The adaptive shift that favored stone tool–assisted behavior in hominins began by 3.3 million years ago. However, evidence from early archaeological sites indicates relatively short-distance stone transport dynamics similar to behaviors observed in nonhuman primates. Here we report selective raw material transport over longer distances than expected at least 2.6 million years ago. Hominins at Nyayanga, Kenya, manufactured Oldowan tools primarily from diverse nonlocal stones, pushing back the date for expanded raw material transport by over half a million years. Nonlocal cobbles were transported up to 13 kilometers for on-site reduction, resulting in assemblage patterns inconsistent with accumulations formed by repeated short-distance transport events. These findings demonstrate that early toolmakers moved stones over substantial distances, possibly in anticipation of food processing needs, representing the earliest archaeologically visible signal for the incorporation of lithic technology into landscape-scale foraging repertoires.more » « less
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Woolly mammoths in mainland Alaska overlapped with the region’s first people for at least a millennium. However, it is unclear how mammoths used the space shared with people. Here, we use detailed isotopic analyses of a female mammoth tusk found in a 14,000-year-old archaeological site to show that she moved ~1000 kilometers from northwestern Canada to inhabit an area with the highest density of early archaeological sites in interior Alaska until her death. DNA from the tusk and other local contemporaneous archaeological mammoth remains revealed that multiple mammoth herds congregated in this region. Early Alaskans seem to have structured their settlements partly based on mammoth prevalence and made use of mammoths for raw materials and likely food.more » « less
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Zhokhov Island in the Siberian High Arctic has yielded evidence for some of the most remote prehistoric human occupation in the world, as well as the oldest-known dog-sled technology. Obsidian artefacts found on Zhokhov have been provenanced using XRF analysis to allow comparison with known sources of obsidian from north-eastern Siberia. The results indicate that the obsidian was sourced from Lake Krasnoe—approximately 1500km distant—and arrived on Zhokhov Island c . 8000 BP. The archaeological data from Zhokhov therefore indicate a super-long-distance Mesolithic exchange network.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2023.4
