9603078 Johnson This Americas Program award will fund a 2-year cooperative research project between Dr. Eileen Johnson, Texas Tech University, and Drs. Gustavo Politis, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina, and Jose Prado, Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. They will study the taphonomic processes involved in the creation of Quaternary archaeological sites in the middle basin of the Rio Quequen Grande in the Argentinean Pampas, with the goal of increasing the database on prehistoric human subsistence and land use. The proposed work focuses on the analysis of modified and unmodified bone recovered from the sites. Modifications will be studied on microscopic, light microscopic, and scanning electron microscopic levels in order to determine their type and source. Based on the analysis of the bone material, buried soils, and radiocarbon dating, the researchers will try to delineate the formative and disturbances processes at work at sites, the subsistence base and social structure of the population, and the environmental and climatic setting of their occupations. The project should advance the comparative understanding of Middle to late Holocene adaptations to grasslands environments. The linkage among limnological processes and human activity in the creation of the archaeological record is crucial to our understanding of early occupations., and the planned reconstruction of the paleolandscapes will constitute a major contribution to the geoarchaeology of the region. ***
