Todd A Surovell
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 179732 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Todd A Surovell |
| NOMBRES | Todd A |
| APELLIDO | Surovell |
| FIRMA | SUROVELL T A |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Wyoming |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6587-8621 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 50 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 1271 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 50 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1999 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 14 |
Anthropogenic burning of small mammals at the Early Paleoindian La Prele Site in Converse County, Wyoming
Integrating LiDAR, GIS, and deep geologic testing to predict buried archaeological components in the Hartville Uplift, Wyoming
Identifying and Investigating Deeply Buried Activity Areas at the La Prele Site
Before 2023, excavations at the La Prele site identified three hearth-centered areas associated with mammoth remains. In 2022 and 2023, more than 150 augers across the site suggested the presence of a bone bed and a fourth activity area with the potential for dense archaeological deposits. Here we report preliminary results comparing the expected versus actual artifact densities to evaluate the use of auger surveys for identifying artifact cluste…
Examining Spatial Organization Through Bone Fragments at Barger Gulch, an Early Folsom Campsite
The study of hunter-gatherer settlements in prehistory has been limited by the often ephemeral nature of these sites. The structures identified at Barger Gulch Locality B, an alpine Folsom campsite, are among the oldest ever found in the western hemisphere. While poor preservation conditions produced a highly fragmented faunal site assemblage, even unidentifiable bone fragments reveal interesting patterns of hunter-gatherer life. In this study, w…
Growing Evidence of a Younger than Clovis Cultural Affiliation
After its excavation in the late 1970s, the Sheaman site was considered one of a small number of Clovis campsites in the west, and the archaeological assemblage produced by these and subsequent excavations has been treated in publication as diagnostic of the Clovis techno-complex. However, the radiocarbon record produced by the site has increasingly cast doubt on this cultural affiliation. In this paper, we present four additional radiocarbon age…
Estimating the Size and Density of the La Prele Site
An incised travertine artifact from the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming
The Barnes Stone is an incised stone artifact found at the base of a roadcut along Red Springs Draw in the southern Bighorn Basin of Wyoming by Jeb Barnes, an avocational archaeologist from Thermopolis, Wyoming. We initially and erroneously identified this artifact as a modified piece of mammoth ivory. In this paper, we not only correct that identification but also report on the results of fieldwork and radiocarbon dating at the find locality, an…
The weathering and scavenging of keratin
The Geochronological and Geoarchaeological Context of the Clovis-Age La Prele Mammoth Site (48CO1401), Converse County, Wyoming
The La Prele Mammoth site (48CO1401), located in Converse County, Wyoming, contains a Clovis-age occupation associated with the remains of a subadult mammoth (Mammuthus columbi). In this paper, we present the geochronological and geoarchaeological context of the site. The La Prele Mammoth site is buried in an alluvial terrace of La Prele Creek, a tributary of the North Platte River, which acts as an important migration corridor through the Rocky …
Evidence supports the efficacy of Clovis points for hunting proboscideans
Bayesian Modeling of the Clovis and Folsom Radiocarbon Records Indicates a 200-Year Multigenerational Transition
An enduring problem in North American archaeology concerns the nature of the transition between the Clovis and Folsom Paleoindian complexes in the West. Traditional models indicate a temporal hiatus between the two complexes implying that Folsom was a population replacement for Clovis. Alternatively, if Folsom was an innovation that occurred within Clovis populations and subsequently spread, we would expect to see a temporal overlap. Here, we tes…
Bayesian Revision of the Folsom Age Range Using IntCal20
Briggs Buchanana*, J. David Kilbyb , Marcus J. Hamiltonc, Jason M. LaBelled, Kelton A. Meyerd , Jacob Holland-Lulewicze, Brian Andrewsf , Brooke M. Morgang, Brendon Asherh, Vance T. Hollidayi , Gregory W. L. Hodginsj & Todd A. Surovellk* a Department of Anthropology, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK, USAb Department of Anthropology, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USAc Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Anto…
Confirming a Cultural Association at the La Prele Mammoth Site (48CO1401), Converse County, Wyoming
Archaeologists have long subjected Clovis megafauna kill/scavenge sites to the highest level of scrutiny. In 1987, a Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) was found in spatial association with a small artifact assemblage in Converse County, Wyoming. However, due to the small tool assemblage, limited nature of the excavations, and questions about the security of the association between the artifacts and mammoth remains, the site was never included…
Validation of a global model of taphonomic bias using geologic radiocarbon ages
Temporal frequency distributions of radiocarbon ages from archaeological sites can be used as a proxy record for human paleodemography after correction for taphonomic bias, or the time dependent loss of sediments due to erosion. Surovell et al. (2009) presented a global taphonomic correction model based on radiocarbon ages from volcanic deposits that has since been used by several researchers for paleodemographic reconstructions. This method is b…
Long-distance transport of red ocher by Clovis foragers
The Wold Bison Jump (48JO966) and its relation to the ancestral Crow on the Northwest Plains
We report results from excavations at the Wold Bison Jump (Wold, site number 48JO966), a Late Prehistoric (ca. 300–500 BP) bison jump located in the southeast foothills of the Bighorn Mountains, Wyoming. We argue that (a) the site was created by the ancestral Crow based on its location, age, material culture, and hunting technique and (b) the jump at Wold triggered a large rock fall event, as evidenced by the presence of articulated bison remains…
Dukha Mobility in a Constructed Environment
Diverse theoretical perspectives suggest that place plays an important role in human behavior. One recent perspective proposes that habitual and recursive use of places among humans may be an emergent property of obligate tool use by our species. In this view, the costs of tool use are reduced by preferential occupation of previously occupied places where cultural materials have been discarded. Here we use the model to generate five predictions f…
Cougar Creek
With more than 15 sources of obsidian and other lithic materials, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem of Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho is one of the richest toolstone regions in northwestern North America. This article introduces a quantitative assessment technique to compare attributes of seven Yellowstone obsidians used by Native Americans over at least 11,000 years. The proposed assessment technique is replicable and adaptable to other regions. Th…
Occupancy and the Use of Household Space Among the Dukha
Archaeologists commonly encounter the occupation surfaces of ephemeral prehistoric houses. Within those spaces, artifacts can exhibit considerable spatial structure raising the question of what that structure can tell us about human behavior. We explore a simple site-formation model in which household occupancy, defined here as the average number of individuals who simultaneously occupy a house, positively predicts artifact dispersion. We confron…
The End of Archaeological Discovery
Except for the addition of modern material remains, the archaeological record is a finite resource, which means that, at some point in the future, there will be nothing left to find. In this paper, we model trends in archaeological discovery based on the growth of the field and the probability of site discovery. We compare this model to seven diverse datasets of archaeological discovery trends: (1) all sites from the state of Wyoming, USA; (2) hi…
Spatial Expression of Kinship among the Dukha Reindeer Herders of Northern Mongolia
Pastoralism represents a crucial shift in the relationship between humans and animals that permeates all aspects of culture. One aspect of this transition is changes to settlement and camp structure. Previous studies indicate pastoralists situate themselves in areas suitable for their domesticated animals as opposed to foragers who situate themselves closer to consumable natural resources, such as food and raw materials. Building on these past st…
Mobility at the scale of meters
When archeologists discuss mobility, we are most often referring to a phenomenon that operates on the scale of kilometers, but much of human mobility, at least if measured in terms of frequency of movement, occurs at much smaller scales, ranging from centimeters to tens of meters. Here we refer to the movements we make within the confines of our homes or places of employment. With respect to nomadic peoples, movements at this scale would include …
On the Dating of the Folsom Complex and its Correlation with the Younger Dryas, the End of Clovis, and Megafaunal Extinction
Using a set of high-quality radiocarbon dates, including three new dates from the Hanson site and one from the Folsom component of Hell Gap, we provide a revised estimate of the duration of the Folsom period. Limiting our sample to bone collagen samples pretreated using the XAD resin chromatographic or ultrafiltration techniques, calcined bone, and charcoal from hearth features, we show that Folsom sites fall within a limited range from 12,610 to…
The Tortoise and the Hare
This study illustrates the potential of small-game data for identifying and dating Paleolithic demographic pulses such as those associated with modern human origins and the later evolution of food-producing economies. Archaeofaunal series from Israel and Italy serve as our examples. Three important implications of this study are that (1) early Middle Paleolithic populations were exceptionally small and highly dispersed, (2) the first major popula…
The Mountaineer Site
The Mountaineer Site: A Folsom Winter Camp in the Rockies." Plains Anthropologist, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
The Tortoise and the Hare
This study illustrates the potential of small-game data for identifying and dating Paleolithic demographic pulses such as those associated with modern human origins and the later evolution of food-producing economies. Archaeofaunal series from Israel and Italy serve as our examples. Three important implications of this study are that (1) early Middle Paleolithic populations were exceptionally small and highly dispersed, (2) the first major popula…
Correcting temporal frequency distributions for taphonomic bias
Clovis Hunting Strategies, or How to Make out on Plentiful Resources
Traditionally, hunter-gatherers of the Clovis period have been characterized as specialized hunters of large terrestrial mammals. Recent critiques have attempted to upend this position both empirically and theoretically, alternatively favoring a more generalized foraging economy. In this paper, the distinction between subsistence specialists and generalists is framed in terms of forager selectivity with regards to hunted prey, following a behavio…
A note on the use of temporal frequency distributions in studies of prehistoric demography
Making a point
What are the advantages of equipping a wooden arrow with stone, rather than just using the sharpened wooden tip? Very few it seems. In a series of well-controlled experiments the authors show that stone arrow-heads achieve barely 10 per cent extra penetration over wood. They then raise some pertinent ideas about the other advantages, social and symbolic that may have driven hunters the world over to adopt the stone tip
Bone Preservation in Hayonim Cave (Israel)
How many elephant kills are 14
Standardizing Infra-red Measures of Bone Mineral Crystallinity
Early Paleoindian Women, Children, Mobility, and Fertility
If we take the archaeological record at face value, the colonization of unglaciated North America appears to have been very rapid. The highly consistent dating of Clovis archaeological sites (11,500-10,800 B.P.) suggests that this continent was populated within a matter of centuries. To explain the spatial and temporal scales of this phenomenon, it is necessary to invoke both high mobility and high fertility rates during the initial colonization …
Simulating Coastal Migration in New World Colonization
On the Dating of the Folsom Complex and its Correlation with the Younger Dryas, the End of Clovis, and Megafaunal Extinction
Using a set of high-quality radiocarbon dates, including three new dates from the Hanson site and one from the Folsom component of Hell Gap, we provide a revised estimate of the duration of the Folsom period. Limiting our sample to bone collagen samples pretreated using the XAD resin chromatographic or ultrafiltration techniques, calcined bone, and charcoal from hearth features, we show that Folsom sites fall within a limited range from 12,610 to…
The Associational Critique of Quaternary Overkill and why it is Largely Irrelevant to the Extinction Debate
The overkill hypothesis has been criticized using a simple observation-with the exception of New Zealand, there is little evidence for human hunting of extinct Quaternary faunas. We explore the legitimacy of this argument, or what we call the 'Associational Critique,' the idea that the paucity of evidence for the subsistence exploitation of extinct taxa weakens or falsifies overkill. Using quantitative and probabilistic models, based on the tempo…
The End of Archaeological Discovery
Except for the addition of modern material remains, the archaeological record is a finite resource, which means that, at some point in the future, there will be nothing left to find. In this paper, we model trends in archaeological discovery based on the growth of the field and the probability of site discovery. We compare this model to seven diverse datasets of archaeological discovery trends: (1) all sites from the state of Wyoming, USA; (2) hi…
Shallow site archaeology
Shallowly buried archaeological sites are particularly susceptible to surface and subsurface disturbance processes. Yet, because cultural deposition often operates on short time scales relative to geologic deposition, vertical artifact distributions can be used to clarify questions of site formation. In particular, patterns in artifact distributions that cannot be explained by occupation histories must be explained by natural processes that have …
Long-distance transport of red ocher by Clovis foragers
Confirming a Cultural Association at the La Prele Mammoth Site (48CO1401), Converse County, Wyoming
Archaeologists have long subjected Clovis megafauna kill/scavenge sites to the highest level of scrutiny. In 1987, a Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) was found in spatial association with a small artifact assemblage in Converse County, Wyoming. However, due to the small tool assemblage, limited nature of the excavations, and questions about the security of the association between the artifacts and mammoth remains, the site was never included…
Bayesian Modeling of the Clovis and Folsom Radiocarbon Records Indicates a 200-Year Multigenerational Transition
An enduring problem in North American archaeology concerns the nature of the transition between the Clovis and Folsom Paleoindian complexes in the West. Traditional models indicate a temporal hiatus between the two complexes implying that Folsom was a population replacement for Clovis. Alternatively, if Folsom was an innovation that occurred within Clovis populations and subsequently spread, we would expect to see a temporal overlap. Here, we tes…
Evidence supports the efficacy of Clovis points for hunting proboscideans
Dukha Mobility in a Constructed Environment
Diverse theoretical perspectives suggest that place plays an important role in human behavior. One recent perspective proposes that habitual and recursive use of places among humans may be an emergent property of obligate tool use by our species. In this view, the costs of tool use are reduced by preferential occupation of previously occupied places where cultural materials have been discarded. Here we use the model to generate five predictions f…
Modeling post-depositional mixing of archaeological deposits
Range sizes and shifts of North American Pleistocene mammals are not consistent with a climatic explanation for extinction
The cause of the terminal Pleistocene extinctions in North America is debated but is most commonly ascribed to climate change or anthropogenic overkill. Based on contemporary extinction theory from conservation biology, we predict that in a climatically induced extinction event, species with small geographic ranges are most likely to suffer extinction. We use two methods to reconstruct Pleistocene range sizes for 194 taxa using data from the FAUN…
Paleoindian environmental change and landscape response in Barger Gulch, Middle Park, Colorado
Middle Park, a high‐altitude basin in the Southern Rocky Mountains of north‐central Colorado, contains at least 59 known Paleoindian localities. At Barger Gulch Locality B, an extensive Folsom assemblage ( ̃10,500 14 C yr B.P.) occurs within a buried soil. Radiocarbon ages of charcoal and soil organic matter, as well as stratigraphic positions of artifacts, indicate the soil is a composite of a truncated, latest‐Pleistocene soil and a younger mol…
Spatial Expression of Kinship among the Dukha Reindeer Herders of Northern Mongolia
Pastoralism represents a crucial shift in the relationship between humans and animals that permeates all aspects of culture. One aspect of this transition is changes to settlement and camp structure. Previous studies indicate pastoralists situate themselves in areas suitable for their domesticated animals as opposed to foragers who situate themselves closer to consumable natural resources, such as food and raw materials. Building on these past st…
The Mountaineer Site
The Mountaineer Site: A Folsom Winter Camp in the Rockies." Plains Anthropologist, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
The Wold Bison Jump (48JO966) and its relation to the ancestral Crow on the Northwest Plains
We report results from excavations at the Wold Bison Jump (Wold, site number 48JO966), a Late Prehistoric (ca. 300–500 BP) bison jump located in the southeast foothills of the Bighorn Mountains, Wyoming. We argue that (a) the site was created by the ancestral Crow based on its location, age, material culture, and hunting technique and (b) the jump at Wold triggered a large rock fall event, as evidenced by the presence of articulated bison remains…
Paleolithic Population Growth Pulses Evidenced by Small Animal Exploitation
Variations in small game hunting along the northern and eastern rims of the Mediterranean Sea and results from predator-prey simulation modeling indicate that human population densities increased abruptly during the late Middle Paleolithic and again during the Upper and Epi-Paleolithic periods. The demographic pulses are evidenced by increasing reliance on agile, fast-reproducing partridges, hares, and rabbits at the expense of slow-reproducing b…
Radiocarbon dating of bone apatite by step heating
Many advances have been made in radiocarbon dating of bone organics, but research on 14C dating of bone inorganic carbon has lagged significantly behind. Using mammoth bone, enamel, and tusk from the Dent and Murray Springs Clovis sites, experiments with the Haas and Banewicz technique of bone apatite dating by step heating demonstrate that accurate radiocarbon ages can be produced from bone apatite carbonate. Furthermore, preliminary findings su…
Early Paleoindian Women, Children, Mobility, and Fertility
If we take the archaeological record at face value, the colonization of unglaciated North America appears to have been very rapid. The highly consistent dating of Clovis archaeological sites (11,500-10,800 B.P.) suggests that this continent was populated within a matter of centuries. To explain the spatial and temporal scales of this phenomenon, it is necessary to invoke both high mobility and high fertility rates during the initial colonization …
The Tortoise and the Hare
This study illustrates the potential of small-game data for identifying and dating Paleolithic demographic pulses such as those associated with modern human origins and the later evolution of food-producing economies. Archaeofaunal series from Israel and Italy serve as our examples. Three important implications of this study are that (1) early Middle Paleolithic populations were exceptionally small and highly dispersed, (2) the first major popula…
Standardizing Infra-red Measures of Bone Mineral Crystallinity
Bone Preservation in Hayonim Cave (Israel)
Clovis Hunting Strategies, or How to Make out on Plentiful Resources
Traditionally, hunter-gatherers of the Clovis period have been characterized as specialized hunters of large terrestrial mammals. Recent critiques have attempted to upend this position both empirically and theoretically, alternatively favoring a more generalized foraging economy. In this paper, the distinction between subsistence specialists and generalists is framed in terms of forager selectivity with regards to hunted prey, following a behavio…
Simulating Coastal Migration in New World Colonization
Global archaeological evidence for proboscidean overkill
One million years ago, proboscideans occupied most of Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Today, wild elephants are only found in portions of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Although the causes of global Pleistocene extinctions in the order Proboscidea remain unresolved, the most common explanations involve climatic change and/or human hunting. In this report, we test the overkill and climate-change hypotheses by using global archaeologica…
Paleoindian environmental change and landscape response in Barger Gulch, Middle Park, Colorado
Middle Park, a high‐altitude basin in the Southern Rocky Mountains of north‐central Colorado, contains at least 59 known Paleoindian localities. At Barger Gulch Locality B, an extensive Folsom assemblage ( ̃10,500 14 C yr B.P.) occurs within a buried soil. Radiocarbon ages of charcoal and soil organic matter, as well as stratigraphic positions of artifacts, indicate the soil is a composite of a truncated, latest‐Pleistocene soil and a younger mol…
Shallow site archaeology
Shallowly buried archaeological sites are particularly susceptible to surface and subsurface disturbance processes. Yet, because cultural deposition often operates on short time scales relative to geologic deposition, vertical artifact distributions can be used to clarify questions of site formation. In particular, patterns in artifact distributions that cannot be explained by occupation histories must be explained by natural processes that have …
A note on the use of temporal frequency distributions in studies of prehistoric demography
Modeling post-depositional mixing of archaeological deposits
How many elephant kills are 14
Toward a Behavioral Ecology of Lithic Technology
Modern humans and their hominid ancestors relied on chipped-stone technology for well over two million years and colonized more than 99 percent of the Earth's habitable landmass in doing so. Yet there currently exist only a handful of informal models derived from ethnographic observation, experiments, engineering, and common sense to explain variability in archaeological lithic assemblages. Because the fundamental processes of making, using, and …
Correcting temporal frequency distributions for taphonomic bias
Making a point
What are the advantages of equipping a wooden arrow with stone, rather than just using the sharpened wooden tip? Very few it seems. In a series of well-controlled experiments the authors show that stone arrow-heads achieve barely 10 per cent extra penetration over wood. They then raise some pertinent ideas about the other advantages, social and symbolic that may have driven hunters the world over to adopt the stone tip
Range sizes and shifts of North American Pleistocene mammals are not consistent with a climatic explanation for extinction
The cause of the terminal Pleistocene extinctions in North America is debated but is most commonly ascribed to climate change or anthropogenic overkill. Based on contemporary extinction theory from conservation biology, we predict that in a climatically induced extinction event, species with small geographic ranges are most likely to suffer extinction. We use two methods to reconstruct Pleistocene range sizes for 194 taxa using data from the FAUN…
The Associational Critique of Quaternary Overkill and why it is Largely Irrelevant to the Extinction Debate
The overkill hypothesis has been criticized using a simple observation-with the exception of New Zealand, there is little evidence for human hunting of extinct Quaternary faunas. We explore the legitimacy of this argument, or what we call the 'Associational Critique,' the idea that the paucity of evidence for the subsistence exploitation of extinct taxa weakens or falsifies overkill. Using quantitative and probabilistic models, based on the tempo…
A continuous climatic impact on Holocene human population in the Rocky Mountains
Ancient cultural changes have often been linked to abrupt climatic events, but the potential that climate can exert a persistent influence on human populations has been debated. Here, independent population, temperature, and moisture history reconstructions from the Bighorn Basin in Wyoming (United States) show a clear quantitative relationship spanning 13 ka, which explains five major periods of population growth/decline and ∼45% of the populati…
L’art mobilier paléoindien du Wyoming (États‐Unis)
Les premiers chercheurs à avoir étudié l’art rupestre du Wyoming ne mesuraient pas la durée d’occupation de la région. David Gebbard créa la première chronologie des manifestations artistiques pour le Wyoming, une séquence relative de quatre styles sur la base des superpositions. Plus récemment, Ron Dorn, Julie Francis et Larry Loendorf ont publié une chronologie à partir de dates radiométriques, des proportions de cation et de la microlamination…
Paleoindian Portable Art from Wyoming (USA)
Paleoindian portable art, while sparse, has been reported from several Wyoming localities, both dated and undated, and with good archaeological provenience or no established provenience. Additional examples have been recovered from many later Holocene sites. Media for these art objects include sandstone, steatite, bison bone, and mammoth ivory. Techniques ranged from light incision and deep scoring to pecking, and motifs ranged from abstract to a…
Viable paleosol microorganisms, paleoclimatic reconstruction, and relative dating in archaeology
Identifying Stone Alignments Created by Adults and Children
Mobility at the scale of meters
When archeologists discuss mobility, we are most often referring to a phenomenon that operates on the scale of kilometers, but much of human mobility, at least if measured in terms of frequency of movement, occurs at much smaller scales, ranging from centimeters to tens of meters. Here we refer to the movements we make within the confines of our homes or places of employment. With respect to nomadic peoples, movements at this scale would include …
Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology (42 obras) · Geography (40 obras) · Archaeology (39 obras) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (33 obras) · Geology (22 obras) · Biology (19 obras) · Paleontology (15 obras) · Geology and Paleoclimatology Research (14 obras) · Ecology (12 obras) · History (12 obras)