The first look at the prehistory of Texas by 16 professional archaeologist.

The end of the Pleistocene era brought dramatic environmental changes to small bands of humans living in North America: changes that affected subsistence, mobility, demography, technology, and social relations. The transition they made from Paleoindian (Pleistocene) to Archaic (Early Holocene) societies represents the first major cultural shift that took place solely in the Americas. This event—which manifested in ways and at times much more varied than often supposed—set the stage for the unique developments of behavioral complexity that distinguish later Native American prehistoric societies. Using localized studies and broad regional syntheses, the contributors to this volume demonstrate the diversity of adaptations to the dynamic and changing environmental and cultural landscapes that occurred between the Pleistocene and early portion of the Holocene. The authors' research areas range from Northern Mexico to Alaska and across the continent to the American Northeast, synthesizing the copious available evidence from well-known and recent excavations.With its methodologically and geographically diverse approach, From the Pleistocene to the Holocene: Human Organization and Cultural Transformations in Prehistoric North America provides an overview of the present state of knowledge regarding this crucial transformative period in Native North America. It offers a large-scale synthesis of human adaptation, reflects the range of ideas and concepts in current archaeological theoretical approaches, and acts as a springboard for future explanations and models of prehistoric change.

International archaeologists examine early Stone Age tools and bones to present the most holistic view to date of the archaeology of human origins.

Geoarchaeology is the archaeological subfield that focuses on archaeological information retrieval and problem solving utilizing the methods of geological investigation. Archaeological recovery and analysis are already geoarchaeological in the most fundamental sense because buried remains are contained within and removed from an essentially geological context. Yet geoarchaeological research goes beyond this simple relationship and attempts to build collaborative links between specialists in archaeology and the earth sciences to produce new knowledge about past human behavior using the technical information and methods of the geosciences. The principal goals of geoarchaeology lie in understanding the relationships between humans and their environment. These goals include (1) how cultures adjust to their ecosystem through time, (2) what earth science factors were related to the evolutionary emergence of humankind, and (3) which methodological tools involving analysis of sediments and landforms, documentation and explanation of change in buried materials, and measurement of time will allow access to new aspects of the past. This encyclopedia defines terms, introduces problems, describes techniques, and discusses theory and strategy, all in a format designed to make specialized details accessible to the public as well as practitioners. It covers subjects in environmental archaeology, dating, materials analysis, and paleoecology, all of which represent different sources of specialist knowledge that must be shared in order to reconstruct, analyze, and explain the record of the human past. It will not specifically cover sites, civilizations, and ancient cultures, etc., that are better described in other encyclopedias of world archaeology. The Editor Allan S. Gilbert is Professor of Anthropology at Fordham University in the Bronx, New York. He holds a B.A. from Rutgers University, and his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. were earned at Columbia University. His areas of research interest include the Near East (late prehistory and early historic periods) as well as the Middle Atlantic region of the U.S. (historical archaeology). His specializations are in archaeozoology of the Near East and geoarchaeology, especially mineralogy and compositional analysis of pottery and building materials. Publications have covered a range of subjects, including ancient pastoralism, faunal quantification, skeletal microanatomy, brick geochemistry, and two co-edited volumes on the marine geology and geoarchaeology of the Black Sea basin.

This book presents an overview of recent research in the field of Pleistocene Archaeology around the world. The main topics of this book are: (1) human migrations, particularly by Homo sapiens who have migrated into most regions of the world and settled in different environments, (2) the development of human technology from early to archaic hominins and Homo sapiens, and (3) human adaptation to new environments and responses to environmental changes caused by climate changes during the Pleistocene. With such perspectives in mind, this book contains a total of nine insightful and stimulating chapters on these topics, in which human history during the time of the Pleistocene is reviewed and discussed.