Hunting and Extinctions in Southwest Asia and North America: The Silent Testimony of Communal Game Traps explores communal game traps for harvesting ungulate herds in two continents, utilizing a comparative approach addressing settings, species, and the hunters’ societies.The kites of Southwest Asia have been known to archaeologists for almost one hundred years but with the advent of high‑resolution satellite images, thousands of sites have been found. Using the rich data ...

For those interested in the archaeology of prehistoric North America, author Leland C. Bement’s Beyond the Bone Beds: Large-Scale Bison Kills in Northwest Oklahoma presents carefully researched technical data that will enlighten scholars, students, field researchers, and general readers alike. Bison are a keystone prey species of the grassland ecosystem, often migrating long distances. North American hunter-gatherers relied on large-scale bison hunting, which greatly influenced th...

Beginning over 10,000 years ago and continuing until the arrival of the Spanish in the 1500s, hunter and gatherer societies occupied the Edwards Plateau of central Texas. Archaeological studies over the past eighty years have reconstructed their subsistence, technology, and settlement patterns, but until now little information has been available on their burial practices, due to the scarcity of known burial sites. This detailed archaeological report describes the human skeletal remains, bu...

Archaeological research on the late Pleistocene and early Holocene periods has tended to focus on rock shelters, caves, large game kills, and occasionally butchery sites. Diversity in Open-Air Site Structure across the Pleistocene/Holocene Boundary examines a diverse range of open-air sites—bounded both naturally and culturally—in Siberia and Germany and throughout North America.Open-air sites are difficult for researchers to locate and, because of depositional processes, ...

The Archaeology of Large-Scale Manipulation of Prey explores the social and functional aspects of large-scale hunting adaptations in the archaeological record. Mass-kill hunting strategies are ubiquitous in human prehistory and exhibit culturally specific economic, social, environmental, and demographic markers. Here, seven case studies—primarily from the Americas and spanning from the Folsom period on the Great Plains to the ethnographic present in Australia—expand the understand...