Embedded Files
A Geoarchaeological Approach to Finding Evidence of the First People in the Americas
The question of when humans first set foot in the Americas is a hotly debated issue. As Director of the Odyssey Archaeological Research Program at the University of Kansas, Dr. Rolfe Mandel is addressing this issue through a geoarchaeological lens. His research seeks to uncover the evidence of the earliest people to inhabit North America and reconstruct the late Pleistocene and early Holocene paleoenvironments that affected their subsistence strategies. His presentation will focus on the results of geoarchaeological research in two very different environments: Eastern Beringia in the Yukon Territory of Canada, where he has been reinvestigating Bluefish Caves, and the Chihuahuan Desert of Southwest Texas, where he has been investigating San Esteban Rockshelter and stream valleys that may contain deeply buried early archaeological records. These investigations demonstrate the power of geoarchaeology for understanding the timing and pathways of early human migration into new regions, as well as the environmental contexts that influenced those migrations.
Rolfe D. Mandel
Dr. Rolfe Mandel received a B.A. in Geography from the University of Texas at Austin, an M.A. in Geography from the University of Kansas (KU), and a Ph.D. in Quaternary Science from KU. For the past 25 years he has been at the University of Kansas serving as Director of the Odyssey Archaeological Research Program (Kansas Geological Survey) and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology. Dr. Mandel has spent most of his career studying earth surface processes, and his extensive corpus of published work spans a wide range of topics, including geoarchaeology, paleopedology, late-Quaternary landscape evolution, isotope geochemistry, and paleoenvironmental reconstruction. He has spent over 45 years working with archaeologists on projects throughout the United States and eastern Mediterranean, focusing on the effects of geologic processes on the archaeological record. Much of his recent research has involved the use of geoscientific methods to search for the earliest evidence of humans in North America.
Dr. Mandel has received many KU awards and distinctions for his research and teaching. Also, the Geological Society of America recognized his achievements with two prestigious awards: the George Rapp Award for outstanding contributions to the interdisciplinary field of archaeological geology, and the Kirk Bryan Award for Excellence. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of Geoarchaeology: An International Journal and held national and international leadership positions, including President of the American Quaternary Association and Chair of the National Academy of Science’s U.S. National Committee for Quaternary Research.
Bridging Disciplines: Geoarchaeology’s role on Excavation Strategies and Biomolecular Analysis
Bridging Disciplines: Geoarchaeology’s role on Excavation Strategies and Biomolecular Analysis
The advent of biomolecular archaeology—particularly the analysis of ancient proteins and sedimentary ancient DNA—has dramatically expanded the ability to study the past. These methods are opening exciting new possibilities, allowing researchers to retrieve biological information not only from bones but from the sediments themselves. In this presentation, Dr. Vera Aldeias will highlight the transformative insights that sediment biomolecule studies are providing into ancient environments, species, and human presence, while emphasizing a critical need: the integration of geoarchaeological perspectives. As the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded MATRIX project, Dr. Aldeias is developing methods that use micromorphology to map and analyze the microcontext of biomolecules within sediments. Her research aims to refine our understanding of how biomolecules are preserved, distributed, and mobilized within archaeological deposits. Combining geoarchaeology with biomolecular research also calls for a rethinking of excavation strategies, integrating innovative approaches that actively target this “invisible” record embedded within the sediments.
Vera Aldeias
I am a Geoarchaeologist interested in unravelling past human behavior from its sedimentary signatures. Identifying where our species first evolved and how specific traits of our current behaviour emerged has become among my major research foci. My ongoing ERC-StG project aims to investigate the population turnover from Neanderthals to anatomical modern humans in Europe by analyzing the microstratigraphic context of sedimentary ancient DNA and paleoproteomics preserved in archaeological sediments. Currently, I am a coordinating researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Archaeology and the Evolution of Human Behaviour (ICArEHB), at the University of Algarve in Faro, Portugal. Before moving to Faro, I completed my PhD research in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, USA), and was a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany).
The keynote speaker, Vera Aldeias, is kindly sponsered by GACT, Geogenomic Archaeology Campus Tübingen, a Leibniz Science Campus based at the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment at the University of Tübingen.
https://geogenarch-tuebingen.de/
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse