Mineral Pigment Provisioning and Utilization in a Long Term Context

Humans are characterized by complex behaviors and social interactions. Understanding what drove such developments, when they occurred, and how they enabled people to migrate, adapt, and thrive in new and changing environments are prominent themes in archaeology. To examine these themes, archaeologists often turn to artifact provenance studies in order to test hypotheses on mobility, resource use, and social networks.

This study will use mineral pigment provenance to examine early and sustained human responses to new and subsequently changing environments in a traditional context. The region preserves a deep temporal record of human occupation, and an archaeological record spanning fluctuations in climate and sea level, habitat change, and megafauna extinctions. The people inhabiting this area used mineral pigments continuously paralleling cultural transitions in diet, mobility, and stone tool technologies.

The datasets produced in the course of this project will be compared to existing data on climate, diet, and mobility to develop new insights into the lifeways of early humans. This project will support the research programs of two early career scientists and support the training and education of graduate students in STEM. The project will make impactful contributions to local communities by engaging site owners as research partners and promote an exemplary model for active and reciprocal collaborative research with descendant Indigenous communities.

The researchers will conduct the first stage of a two stage project that seeks to examine long-term patterns in mobility and resource use through a lens of mineral pigment acquisition. The study will integrate field-based research with advanced scientific techniques to characterize the long-term history of mineral pigment collection, preferences, and use.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.