The antiquity of human presence in the Americas has been a topic of intense debate in archaeology since the inception of the discipline as a scientific study. A century of multidisciplinary investigations have failed to achieve consensus on indentifying the earliest humans to inhabit the Western Hemisphere, their origins, routes, and the antiquity of their initial dispersals. Hundreds of Late Pleistocene human occupations have been documented in both North and South America. This is not the case for Middle America where only a handful of early sites have provided diagnostic artifacts in datable context. In the absence of a clear understanding of what happened in this intermediate region, the early archaeological records of North and South America will be difficult to reconcile. This is problematic because the geographic location and the relatively narrow expanse makes Middle America a natural funnel of early human movement.
This dissertation contributes to advancing understanding of early human occupation in Middle America in three ways: (1) it provides a synthesis of the known archaeological sites of Terminal Pleistocene/early Holocene age; (2) it evaluates lithic analysis of the most pervasive Middle American lithic technologies, Clovis-like and Fell-like points, as to assess their relationship to North and South America; and (3) it focuses on a single case of possible Late Pleistocene human interactions with extinct Central American megafauna through the examination of the paleontological site of Chivacabé (Ttzi’kab’b’e) located in the western highlands of Guatemala.
The data collected for this dissertation reveals that (1) the majority of Late Pleistocene artifacts from Middle America are surface finds, and only a handful of sites have been archaeologically excavated and/or have produced radiometric dates; (2) North American Clovis-like and South American Fell-like projectile points represent the majority of the Paleoamerican record in this area; and (3) clear evidence of human and extinct Late Pleistocene megafauna interaction is still a matter of debate and merits future research. / 2025-07-31T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/47995 |
| Date | 01 February 2024 |
| Creators | Giron-Ábrego, Mario |
| Contributors | Carballo, David M., Runnels, Curtis N. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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