D Shane Miller
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 84944 |
|---|---|
| NOME | D Shane Miller |
| PRENOMES | D Shane |
| SOBRENOME | Miller |
| ASSINATURA | MILLER D S |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Mississippi State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2654-0569 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 34 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 185 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 33 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2011 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2027 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Foraging Theory and the Colonization of Unfamiliar Landscapes
How humans perceive risk has long been of interest to the social sciences. The colonization of unfamiliar landscapes by Late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers is a valuable case study that required novel strategies of risk management, technological organization, and ecological knowledge acquisition. Here, we apply evolutionary theory to projectile point reduction in the Tennessee River Valley to model utility thresholds and assess resharpening versus …
Site Formation Processes at the Hester Site (22MO569)
The Hester Site (22MO569) is a multi‐component archeological site located in northeastern Mississippi with occupations spanning the Late Pleistocene through Holocene chronozones. The site was initially investigated by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) in the 1970s and is notable for being a rare example of a stratified, open‐air site dating to the Late Pleistocene in the American Southeast. However, while the temporally di…
Replication as a Virtue
Surovell and colleagues’ recent publication claiming that the Monte Verde II archaeological component dates to the Middle Holocene rather than the Late Pleistocene has generated considerable controversy. We argue that perhaps the most significant contribution of their study is not its chronological conclusions, but what it represents as a scientific practice; that is, the first truly independent geochronological investigation of one of the most c…
Response to Davis (2026)
Davis 2026. “Reevaluation Is Not Novel, and Not All Reevaluations Are Equal: A Response to Tune and Miller.” PaleoAmerica 12 (2). https://doi.org/10.1080/20555563.2026.2670166] misrepresents what we stated in our comment. We respond by reaffirming what we actually stated: that foundational claims are rarely subjected to independent geochronological scrutiny and that our comment was a perspective piece on scientific practice and epistemology, not …
Exploring settlement distribution and demographic change in the early through late Holocene Southeast
Early-Holocene Stemmed Bifaces from the Hester Site (22MO569) in the Upper Tombigbee River Valley, Mississippi
In the American Southeast, the most widely cited chronologies place the first appearance of stemmed-based points at the onset of the Middle Holocene (∼8200 calendar years ago), much later in comparison to the Great Basin and Pacific Northwest, where stemmed points appear to be co-eval with the Clovis culture (∼13,000 calendar years ago), or even older. However, the stemmed “Jude” point found in northern and central Mississippi may be an exception…
Theoretical and Methodological Contributions from Researching the Earliest Southeastern Record
We review the contributions of archaeologists studying the Pleistocene and Early Holocene records in the American Southeast. Researchers have made great efforts in finding paleoenvironmental proxies for the past, discovering underwater sites, and embracing a record of isolated point finds. With a renewed interest in technological organization and behavioral ecology, researchers study landscape use as adaptive responses and consider the role of so…
Copper on the Mississippi coast
The oldest house in the Southeast? Identifying a probable Clovis domestic structure at the Topper site, South Carolina
Topper Site Revisited
Topper is one of the largest buried Clovis sites in North America. The decades of archaeological excavations and analyses of Topper assemblages have informed our understanding of Clovis technology, mobility, settlement, and, more recently, chronology in the American Southeast. In this paper, we use spatial analysis to explore intra-site variation at Topper. We find that distance and elevation from the outcrop influenced the organization of core a…
Early Holocene landscape use in the upper Tombigbee River valley
We draw on the distribution of recorded archaeological sites, temporally diagnostic projectile points, sources of lithic raw materials, and fossil pollen projections to evaluate existing models for Early Holocene landscape use in the upper Tombigbee River valley (UTRV) in northeast Mississippi. We then discuss the applicability of Anderson and Hanson (1988), Daniel (2001), and Hollenbach (2009) in gaining a better understanding of early hunter-ga…
A brief history of modeling Early Holocene landscape use in the American Southeast
The Early Holocene is a critical period in the American Southeast and represents the time between the end of the Pleistocene and emerging cultural complexity of the Mid-Holocene. Due to the limitations imposed by a relative lack of site preservation, an important avenue of inquiry for understanding this period has been connecting the few reported, well-dated sites with the distribution of surface finds to explore how people organized their mobili…
The American Southeast at the End of the Ice Age
Current Understanding of the Earliest Human Occupations in the Americas
Various chronologies of the earliest Native American occupations have been proposed with varying levels of empirical support and conceptual rigor, yet none is widely accepted. A recent survey of pre-Clovis dated sites (Becerra-Valdivia and Higham 2020) concludes a pre-Last Glacial Maximum (>26,500–19,000 cal yr BP) entry of humans in the Americas, in part based on recent work at Chiquihuite Cave, Mexico. We evaluate the evidence used to develop t…
American Southeast at the End of the Ice Age
Assessing raw material diversity at Poverty Point (16WC5) using non‐destructive reflectance spectroscopy
Lithic raw material variation is valuable for assessing the scale of human mobility, differential access to and from raw material sources, and prehistoric exchange patterns. Recent advancements in non‐destructive reflectance spectroscopy have proven to be more accurate in provenance investigations compared with the macroscopic (visual) identification technique for lithic artifacts. Here, we use visible/near‐infrared reflectance and Fourier transf…
Does the evidence at Arroyo del Vizcaíno (Uruguay) support the claim of human occupation 30,000 years ago
Researchers at Arroyo del Vizcaíno (AdV), Uruguay, have argued that human occupation dates prior to the Last Glacial Maximum (33,000–31,000 cal BP) based on the presence of purported stone tools and cutmarks on bones. We provide a summary of their research and critically evaluate these claims. We conclude that the claims of a pre-LGM occupation at AdV are unsupported due to: (1) equivocal evidence that the purported stone tools are culturally mod…
Understanding migration to protected area buffer zones in Costa Rica utilizing cultural consensus analysis
Human migration to the world’s protected areas’ (PA) buffer zones is widely seen as a significant threat to conserving biodiversity. Research since 2005 has demonstrated some evidence for global migration trends but also highlighted the simultaneous need to understand the local, contextual factors that drive migration around individual PAs. Investigation into human migration patterns to these buffer zones has frequently relied on methods that do …
A New Radiocarbon Database for the Lower 48 States
From 2014 to 2020, we compiled radiocarbon ages from the lower 48 states, creating a database of more than 100,000 archaeological, geological, and paleontological ages that will be freely available to researchers through the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database. Here, we discuss the process used to compile ages, general characteristics of the database, and lessons learned from this exercise in 'big data' compilation
Clovis through Big Sandy Technological Response to the Younger Dryas in Northern Alabama
Kuhn and Miller (2015) suggest that changes in projectile point life histories could result from (a) increased replacement costs due to limited raw material access, or (b) a decline in average hunting returns. In northern Alabama, where raw material access can be held constant, we use variation in biotic structures to make predictions for life histories of Clovis to Big Sandy projectile points over the course of the Younger Dryas (12,900–11,700 c…
Evaluating Claims of Early Human Occupation at Chiquihuite Cave, Mexico
Archaeologists working in Mexico recently claimed evidence for pre-Last Glacial Maximum human occupation in the Americas, based on lithic items excavated from Chiquihuite Cave, Zacatecas. Although they provide extensive array of ancillary studies of the cave's chronostratigraphic and paleoenvironmental record, the data they present do not support their central argument, that these lithic items are anthropogenic and represent a unique lithic indus…
Fire on the Mountain
The colonisation of North America and subsequent adaptation to climate change are major research foci in the American Southeast. Here, we used the Ideal Free Distribution from Behavioural Ecology and projections of fossil pollen to generate predictions for landscape use. We tested these predictions against the distribution of previously recorded projectile points in the Paleoindian Database of the Americas and archaeological sites in the Digital …
Analysis of pathology and activity‐related changes to the patellae of individuals from Tell Abraq
The examination of comingled ossuary collections creates unique analytical issues as bones are rarely articulated, requiring that the skeletal elements be examined on an individual basis. A result is that the estimation of crucial demographic information like age at death and sex becomes problematic and attempts to ascertain this information involve a high degree of error. Bearing these issues in mind, however, the focus of this project is to ide…
Clovis across the continent
Food Production in Native North America
In this volume Kristen Gremillion provides a thorough and encompassing overview of the various ways in which people produced food in North America. Rather than focusing simply on a descriptive over
Pleistocene Human Settlement in the Southeastern United States
Research into the earliest occupations in the southeastern United States has been underway since the 1930s, when a pattern of large-scale excavations combined with the reporting of surface finds was initiated that continues to this day. Work at Macon Plateau and Parrish Village, excavated during the New Deal, was followed by a series of stratigraphic excavations in floodplains, rockshelters, and other locales from the 1940s onward. These early st…
Early colonization of Beringia and Northern North America
Modeling Clovis Landscape Use and Recovery Bias in the Southeastern United States Using the Paleoindian Database of the Americas (Pidba)
In eastern North America, there are few stratified sites dating to the Late Pleistocene epoch (> 11,700 cal B.P.). Instead, researchers have relied on the distribution of surface sites and isolated finds to make inferences about how the early inhabitants of the region used the landscape. While proxies for modern recovery bias have been found to affect artifact recovery at a national scale, in the southeastern United States, I argue, they are poor…
Evidence for Younger Dryas global climate oscillation and human response in the American Southwest
Evaluating Claims of Early Human Occupation at Chiquihuite Cave, Mexico
Archaeologists working in Mexico recently claimed evidence for pre-Last Glacial Maximum human occupation in the Americas, based on lithic items excavated from Chiquihuite Cave, Zacatecas. Although they provide extensive array of ancillary studies of the cave's chronostratigraphic and paleoenvironmental record, the data they present do not support their central argument, that these lithic items are anthropogenic and represent a unique lithic indus…
A New Radiocarbon Database for the Lower 48 States
From 2014 to 2020, we compiled radiocarbon ages from the lower 48 states, creating a database of more than 100,000 archaeological, geological, and paleontological ages that will be freely available to researchers through the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database. Here, we discuss the process used to compile ages, general characteristics of the database, and lessons learned from this exercise in 'big data' compilation
Pidba (Paleoindian Database of the Americas)
The organizers of PIDBA (the Paleoindian Database of the Americas) ask for help in updating information
Fire on the Mountain
The colonisation of North America and subsequent adaptation to climate change are major research foci in the American Southeast. Here, we used the Ideal Free Distribution from Behavioural Ecology and projections of fossil pollen to generate predictions for landscape use. We tested these predictions against the distribution of previously recorded projectile points in the Paleoindian Database of the Americas and archaeological sites in the Digital …
Assessing raw material diversity at Poverty Point (16WC5) using non‐destructive reflectance spectroscopy
Lithic raw material variation is valuable for assessing the scale of human mobility, differential access to and from raw material sources, and prehistoric exchange patterns. Recent advancements in non‐destructive reflectance spectroscopy have proven to be more accurate in provenance investigations compared with the macroscopic (visual) identification technique for lithic artifacts. Here, we use visible/near‐infrared reflectance and Fourier transf…
Does the evidence at Arroyo del Vizcaíno (Uruguay) support the claim of human occupation 30,000 years ago
Researchers at Arroyo del Vizcaíno (AdV), Uruguay, have argued that human occupation dates prior to the Last Glacial Maximum (33,000–31,000 cal BP) based on the presence of purported stone tools and cutmarks on bones. We provide a summary of their research and critically evaluate these claims. We conclude that the claims of a pre-LGM occupation at AdV are unsupported due to: (1) equivocal evidence that the purported stone tools are culturally mod…
Clovis through Big Sandy Technological Response to the Younger Dryas in Northern Alabama
Kuhn and Miller (2015) suggest that changes in projectile point life histories could result from (a) increased replacement costs due to limited raw material access, or (b) a decline in average hunting returns. In northern Alabama, where raw material access can be held constant, we use variation in biotic structures to make predictions for life histories of Clovis to Big Sandy projectile points over the course of the Younger Dryas (12,900–11,700 c…
Exploring settlement distribution and demographic change in the early through late Holocene Southeast
Analysis of pathology and activity‐related changes to the patellae of individuals from Tell Abraq
The examination of comingled ossuary collections creates unique analytical issues as bones are rarely articulated, requiring that the skeletal elements be examined on an individual basis. A result is that the estimation of crucial demographic information like age at death and sex becomes problematic and attempts to ascertain this information involve a high degree of error. Bearing these issues in mind, however, the focus of this project is to ide…
Evidence for Younger Dryas global climate oscillation and human response in the American Southwest
Regional variation in the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene radiocarbon record of eastern North America
In this paper we use radiocarbon dates to evaluate the signature of the Younger Dryas Chronozone (YDC) in eastern North America. Using an approach that examines radiocarbon dates by region, we argue that the northeastern United States shows a better overall representation of radiocarbon dates when compared to the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast. These data result in a peak in summed probability distributions during the YDC, which is often interpreted …
Crowfield (AFHJ-31)
Pleistocene Human Settlement in the Southeastern United States
Research into the earliest occupations in the southeastern United States has been underway since the 1930s, when a pattern of large-scale excavations combined with the reporting of surface finds was initiated that continues to this day. Work at Macon Plateau and Parrish Village, excavated during the New Deal, was followed by a series of stratigraphic excavations in floodplains, rockshelters, and other locales from the 1940s onward. These early st…
Modeling Clovis Landscape Use and Recovery Bias in the Southeastern United States Using the Paleoindian Database of the Americas (Pidba)
In eastern North America, there are few stratified sites dating to the Late Pleistocene epoch (> 11,700 cal B.P.). Instead, researchers have relied on the distribution of surface sites and isolated finds to make inferences about how the early inhabitants of the region used the landscape. While proxies for modern recovery bias have been found to affect artifact recovery at a national scale, in the southeastern United States, I argue, they are poor…
Pidba (Paleoindian Database of the Americas)
The organizers of PIDBA (the Paleoindian Database of the Americas) ask for help in updating information
Early colonization of Beringia and Northern North America
From Colonization to Domestication
"Winner of the Don D. and Catherine S. Fowler Prize. Eastern North America is one of only a handful of places in the world where people first discovered how to domesticate plants. In this book, anthropologist Shane Miller uses two common, although unconventional, sources of archaeological data, stone tools and the distribution of archaeological sites, to trace subsistence decisions from the initial colonization of the American Southeast at the en…
Works in stone
Analysis of pathology and activity‐related changes to the patellae of individuals from Tell Abraq
The examination of comingled ossuary collections creates unique analytical issues as bones are rarely articulated, requiring that the skeletal elements be examined on an individual basis. A result is that the estimation of crucial demographic information like age at death and sex becomes problematic and attempts to ascertain this information involve a high degree of error. Bearing these issues in mind, however, the focus of this project is to ide…
Fire on the Mountain
The colonisation of North America and subsequent adaptation to climate change are major research foci in the American Southeast. Here, we used the Ideal Free Distribution from Behavioural Ecology and projections of fossil pollen to generate predictions for landscape use. We tested these predictions against the distribution of previously recorded projectile points in the Paleoindian Database of the Americas and archaeological sites in the Digital …
Clovis through Big Sandy Technological Response to the Younger Dryas in Northern Alabama
Kuhn and Miller (2015) suggest that changes in projectile point life histories could result from (a) increased replacement costs due to limited raw material access, or (b) a decline in average hunting returns. In northern Alabama, where raw material access can be held constant, we use variation in biotic structures to make predictions for life histories of Clovis to Big Sandy projectile points over the course of the Younger Dryas (12,900–11,700 c…
Evaluating Claims of Early Human Occupation at Chiquihuite Cave, Mexico
Archaeologists working in Mexico recently claimed evidence for pre-Last Glacial Maximum human occupation in the Americas, based on lithic items excavated from Chiquihuite Cave, Zacatecas. Although they provide extensive array of ancillary studies of the cave's chronostratigraphic and paleoenvironmental record, the data they present do not support their central argument, that these lithic items are anthropogenic and represent a unique lithic indus…
The American Southeast at the End of the Ice Age
Current Understanding of the Earliest Human Occupations in the Americas
Various chronologies of the earliest Native American occupations have been proposed with varying levels of empirical support and conceptual rigor, yet none is widely accepted. A recent survey of pre-Clovis dated sites (Becerra-Valdivia and Higham 2020) concludes a pre-Last Glacial Maximum (>26,500–19,000 cal yr BP) entry of humans in the Americas, in part based on recent work at Chiquihuite Cave, Mexico. We evaluate the evidence used to develop t…
American Southeast at the End of the Ice Age
Assessing raw material diversity at Poverty Point (16WC5) using non‐destructive reflectance spectroscopy
Lithic raw material variation is valuable for assessing the scale of human mobility, differential access to and from raw material sources, and prehistoric exchange patterns. Recent advancements in non‐destructive reflectance spectroscopy have proven to be more accurate in provenance investigations compared with the macroscopic (visual) identification technique for lithic artifacts. Here, we use visible/near‐infrared reflectance and Fourier transf…
Does the evidence at Arroyo del Vizcaíno (Uruguay) support the claim of human occupation 30,000 years ago
Researchers at Arroyo del Vizcaíno (AdV), Uruguay, have argued that human occupation dates prior to the Last Glacial Maximum (33,000–31,000 cal BP) based on the presence of purported stone tools and cutmarks on bones. We provide a summary of their research and critically evaluate these claims. We conclude that the claims of a pre-LGM occupation at AdV are unsupported due to: (1) equivocal evidence that the purported stone tools are culturally mod…
Understanding migration to protected area buffer zones in Costa Rica utilizing cultural consensus analysis
Human migration to the world’s protected areas’ (PA) buffer zones is widely seen as a significant threat to conserving biodiversity. Research since 2005 has demonstrated some evidence for global migration trends but also highlighted the simultaneous need to understand the local, contextual factors that drive migration around individual PAs. Investigation into human migration patterns to these buffer zones has frequently relied on methods that do …
A New Radiocarbon Database for the Lower 48 States
From 2014 to 2020, we compiled radiocarbon ages from the lower 48 states, creating a database of more than 100,000 archaeological, geological, and paleontological ages that will be freely available to researchers through the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database. Here, we discuss the process used to compile ages, general characteristics of the database, and lessons learned from this exercise in 'big data' compilation
Topper Site Revisited
Topper is one of the largest buried Clovis sites in North America. The decades of archaeological excavations and analyses of Topper assemblages have informed our understanding of Clovis technology, mobility, settlement, and, more recently, chronology in the American Southeast. In this paper, we use spatial analysis to explore intra-site variation at Topper. We find that distance and elevation from the outcrop influenced the organization of core a…
Early Holocene landscape use in the upper Tombigbee River valley
We draw on the distribution of recorded archaeological sites, temporally diagnostic projectile points, sources of lithic raw materials, and fossil pollen projections to evaluate existing models for Early Holocene landscape use in the upper Tombigbee River valley (UTRV) in northeast Mississippi. We then discuss the applicability of Anderson and Hanson (1988), Daniel (2001), and Hollenbach (2009) in gaining a better understanding of early hunter-ga…
A brief history of modeling Early Holocene landscape use in the American Southeast
The Early Holocene is a critical period in the American Southeast and represents the time between the end of the Pleistocene and emerging cultural complexity of the Mid-Holocene. Due to the limitations imposed by a relative lack of site preservation, an important avenue of inquiry for understanding this period has been connecting the few reported, well-dated sites with the distribution of surface finds to explore how people organized their mobili…
Clovis across the continent
Early-Holocene Stemmed Bifaces from the Hester Site (22MO569) in the Upper Tombigbee River Valley, Mississippi
In the American Southeast, the most widely cited chronologies place the first appearance of stemmed-based points at the onset of the Middle Holocene (∼8200 calendar years ago), much later in comparison to the Great Basin and Pacific Northwest, where stemmed points appear to be co-eval with the Clovis culture (∼13,000 calendar years ago), or even older. However, the stemmed “Jude” point found in northern and central Mississippi may be an exception…
Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (26 obras) · Geography (24 obras) · Archaeology (23 obras) · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology (21 obras) · Geology (12 obras) · History (12 obras) · Holocene (10 obras) · Geology and Paleoclimatology Research (9 obras) · Pleistocene (9 obras) · Physical geography (8 obras)