Shanti Morell-Hart

Late Pleistocene Human Skeleton and mtDNA Link Paleoamericans and Modern Native Americans

American Beauty Modern Native American ancestry traces back to an East Asian migration across Beringia. However, some Native American skeletons from the late Pleistocene show phenotypic characteristics more similar to other, more geographically distant, human populations. Chatters et al. (p. 750) describe a skeleton with a Paleoamerican phenotype from the eastern Yucatan, dating to approximately 12 to 13 thousand years ago, with a relatively common extant Native American mitochondrial DNA haplotype. The Paleoamerican phenotype may thus have evolved independently among Native American populations. The differences between Paleoamericans and Native Americans likely resulted from local evolution. Because of differences in craniofacial morphology and dentition between the earliest American skeletons and modern Native Americans, separate origins have been postulated for them, despite genetic evidence to the contrary. We describe a near-complete human skeleton with an intact cranium and preserved DNA found with extinct fauna in a submerged cave on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. This skeleton dates to between 13,000 and 12,000 calendar years ago and has Paleoamerican craniofacial characteristics and a Beringian-derived mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup (D1). Thus, the differences between Paleoamericans and Native Americans probably resulted from in situ evolution rather than separate ancestry.

MULTI-PROXY ANALYSIS OF PLANT USE AT FORMATIVE PERIOD LOS NARANJOS, HONDURAS

Author(s): Morell-Hart, S; Joyce, RA; Henderson, JS | Abstract: Copyright

Exploring Culinary Practices Through GIS Modeling at Joya de Cerén, El Salvador

Spatial analyses at the resolution of an archaeological site are usually complicated by the fact that objects and organic remains uncovered through excavation are often not found in their original location of manufacture, use, or even discard. As a result, fine-grained analyses of context-dependent culinary practices and foodways, which rely on the conjunction of both forms of evidence, may be less easily interpretable. The creation of a GIS-based spatial database, however, at the site of Joya de Ceren, El Salvador, permits just such insights into food preparation and consumption due to the sudden and catastrophic circumstances of the preservation of the site. Preliminary spatial analyses of the distributions of in situ ceramic vessels, food-processing implements (manos, metates), and paleoethnobotanical remains, confirm and elaborate upon the observations of the original excavators, including the identification of new potential activity areas within “storage” structures and possible “culinary sets” of vessels, food processing implements, and plants associated with repeated tasks in delimited areas, here labeled as “taskscapes”. The results of this study encourage further digitization of both legacy and recently uncovered archaeological data in spatial databases to continue to explore such relationships.