The research was led by Kelly Graf, professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas, who co-wrote the paper with Ted Goebel, KU professor of anthropology and department chair, doctoral student Mia Harbort, undergraduate Mason Sewing, and other colleagues from the United States and Europe. Graf began traveling to the site in 2013 and returned every year until the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted fieldwork, with subsequent seasons in 2021, 2023 and 2025. As director of the excavation project, she secured several National Science Foundation grants totaling 400,000 dollars to support the work. The effort has yielded more than 80,000 archaeological specimens, an assemblage that includes a unique hafted-biface form, tools made from bone and antler, a diverse array of animal remains, and remarkably well-preserved activity areas where ancient camp tasks can still be read from the ground.

To understand why the site matters, it helps to picture the world of the late Pleistocene. The Bering Land Bridge formed about 35,000 years ago, when sea levels dropped far enough to expose the continental shelf between Siberia and Alaska, and it remained above water until rising seas submerged it around 12,000 years ago. During that window, a region larger than many modern countries served as both a corridor and a homeland. Today the area around the Shég’ Xdaltth’i’ site is cloaked in spruce forest, but during the final millennia of the Ice Age it was covered in shrub-tundra vegetation, a cold, open landscape in which hardy plants, large herbivores and the people who hunted them coexisted along the Tanana River, one of the major river systems of interior Alaska.

The faunal record from the site shows that its residents were skilled hunters of Ice Age megafauna. Mammoth, bison and horse, all three of which are now extinct, appear in the assemblage alongside caribou, a species that survives today and remains a critically important resource for Indigenous communities across Alaska. Graf noted that caribou has always been a vital resource for the region’s Indigenous peoples, a continuity that stretches back to the very occupations her team has excavated. The combination of extinct and extant prey in a single site illustrates the breadth of the late-glacial subsistence economy and the flexibility hunters needed to survive in a subarctic environment where seasons were extreme and resources patchy.

Among the most evocative discoveries is a large stone anvil found within a dwelling feature. Around it, the excavators found bison bones that had been deliberately broken apart, along with numerous quartz and quartzite hammerstones, the tools used to fracture the bone. Graf explained that the pattern suggests people were using these stones to fully process the bones in order to extract marrow and likely to render grease, a calorie-rich food product that would have been essential in a northern winter. All of this activity, she said, was taking place near a large earth oven, a heated pit used for slow cooking. Together, the anvil, the hammerstones, the shattered bones and the oven preserve a frozen moment of camp life: a group processing an animal carcass into fat and marrow, likely sharing the results around a hearth.

Other key finds point to the sophistication of the site’s inhabitants. Bird bones were fashioned into needles, evidence of tailored clothing sewn from hides, an indispensable technology for people enduring Ice Age winters in a treeless landscape. The team also recovered numerous diamond-shaped bifacial points, which Graf suggested may have served as the sharpened tips of weapons. The shape is distinctive: she said it is the only site in Alaska that features this clear diamond form, and the only other places from this period with such points in a northern context lie on the Russian side of the land bridge. That distribution carries a striking implication. As Graf put it, it suggests people traveled across the Bering Land Bridge to, and possibly from, this location, making the site a potential waypoint in the back-and-forth movements that ultimately populated two continents.

Technically, the site contributes to a long-running debate about how and when humans moved from Asia into the Americas. Beringian archaeological occupations are concentrated in an area only slightly larger than the U.S. state of Maryland, which makes each well-documented site disproportionately valuable. The three components at Shég’ Xdaltth’i’, separated by roughly a thousand years, span the transition from the late-glacial period into the early Holocene, capturing what researchers describe as settling-in behavior: the process by which newly arrived populations learned the geography, established recurring camps, and developed the toolkits and food-processing strategies suited to a far northern setting. The presence of a dwelling feature, organized activity areas and repeated occupations indicates that this was a base camp, a place to which people returned, rather than a brief hunting stop.

The publication, titled “Highlights from an early base camp in Beringia 13,800 years ago: Shég’ Xdaltth’i’ and the Late Pleistocene Peopling of Alaska,” appears in Science Advances, a peer-reviewed journal. The research is an observational study of the archaeological record, and the authors declare no competing interests. For Graf, who has been at the University of Kansas since 2022 and specializes in Ice Age archaeology, environmental archaeology and the peopling of the Americas, the fascination began in an undergraduate North American archaeology class. She recalled falling in love with the Bering Land Bridge concept: people hunting megafauna and traveling from one massive continent to another across exposed continental shelf, studying extinct animals and the tools hunters used to take them. She described getting caught up in the wonder of that vision.

Beyond the individual artifacts, Graf frames the work as part of a larger effort to understand human evolution and adaptation. What began as a mere handful of individuals in a small region has expanded to more than 8 billion people in a fraction of geological time, a trajectory she finds remarkable given humanity’s meager beginnings as hunter-gatherers. Studying how early Beringians coped with the exigencies of Ice Age life, she argues, informs how humans have always adapted and responded to challenges. The more we learn about the evolution of the Homo sapiens species, she said, the more we can understand ourselves today. In that sense, the broken bison bones, the sewing needles and the diamond-shaped points on an Alaskan ridge are not just relics of a distant past but evidence of the problem-solving capacities that carried our species across a vanished land bridge and, eventually, around the entire world.

For now, the Shég’ Xdaltth’i’ site stands as one of the clearest windows into the lives of the people who stood at the threshold of the Americas nearly 14,000 years ago. Its 80,000-plus specimens continue to be analyzed, and each field season adds detail to the picture of a community that hunted mammoth and caribou, rendered grease from bone beside earth ovens, sewed tailored clothing with bone needles, and carried weapon technology across a land bridge that no longer exists. The name given to the site by Alaska Native Athabascan speakers, “they were there,” proves an apt summary of what the archaeology shows: a resilient group of hunter-gatherers, present on that ridge through centuries of change, leaving behind the material record of how they lived.

Subject of Research: Late Pleistocene archaeology of a 13,800-year-old base camp in Beringia, Alaska, and its evidence for the peopling of the Americas

Article Title: Bering Land Bridge base camp reveals what life was like nearly 14,000 years ago

Article References: Bering Land Bridge base camp reveals what life was like nearly 14,000 years ago. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Bering Land Bridge, Beringia, Alaska archaeology, Shég’ Xdaltth’i’, Pleistocene, megafauna, hunter-gatherers, peopling of the Americas, Tanana River, Science Advances, University of Kansas, late-glacial

The research team set out to reconstruct what actually happened to population levels across Japan in the centuries surrounding the eruption. Rather than relying on a single line of evidence, the study examined patterns of human presence across different regions, comparing the situation before the disaster with the situation after it. The volcanic ash itself provides a convenient marker for archaeologists: the so-called disaster layer runs across the landscape of southern Kyushu like a horizontal line, and by studying what life was like below this line and above it, researchers can trace human impacts and responses across the catastrophic boundary. This approach allowed the team to move beyond sweeping narratives of total collapse or unbroken continuity and to identify regionally distinct demographic trajectories that had never been recognized before.

One of the study’s most striking findings concerns southern Kyushu, the region closest to the eruption. The evidence indicates that Jomon forager populations there were already in decline long before the volcano exploded. The disaster, in other words, struck a region that was already sparsely populated and that was only being visited by highly mobile groups rather than densely settled communities. This pre-existing pattern of low and declining population fundamentally shaped how the eruption was experienced in the area. The devastation near the epicenter was real and severe, but the human cost was distributed across a landscape that had already been largely emptied of permanent settlement, a nuance that earlier debates about the eruption had largely overlooked.

In northern Kyushu, the picture was dramatically different. Populations there had been growing before the eruption, and remarkably, this growth trend continued right through the disaster and its aftermath, despite the massive and enduring damage that the eruption inflicted on regional ecosystems. The authors suggest that this resilient growth may have been driven in part by refugees moving out of the worst-hit areas immediately after the catastrophe. Survivors fleeing the ash-buried landscapes of the south appear to have been absorbed into communities further north, where they forged new social relations and contributed to continued demographic expansion. The finding challenges any assumption that a volcanic disaster of this magnitude must produce uniform demographic collapse across an entire archipelago, and instead reveals a patchwork of local outcomes shaped by geography, mobility and social connection.

The study also identified a distinctive pattern of movement and adaptation among inland survivors. Rather than remaining in the devastated interior, these groups appear to have moved away and clustered along northern coastlines, where marine ecosystems recovered relatively quickly after the eruption. Population growth in these coastal zones may have been accelerated by new kinds of adaptation focused on exploiting the abundant resources of the sea. In this sense, the disaster did not merely destroy; it also redirected human settlement and subsistence, pushing communities toward the coast and encouraging economic innovations centered on marine resources. Lead author Enrico Crema, a professor at Cambridge University, notes that while the disaster caused major loss of life, survivors migrated, forged new social relations, innovated new kinds of economy, and appear to have found creative ways to exist and later thrive in the new post-disaster conditions.

Perhaps the most unexpected discovery lies in the more distant regions of Japan, far from the eruption itself. These areas had experienced population growth before the disaster, but after it they saw demographic stagnation or even decline. Such far-reaching effects had never been identified before, and their causes remain under investigation. The authors propose several possible explanations. The eruption may have triggered short-term climate change with consequences that rippled across the archipelago. Alternatively, or additionally, the deer and boar that the Jomon relied on for their food supplies may have suffered catastrophic tooth attrition, possibly a consequence of the animals grazing in ash-covered landscapes, undermining a critical food source for hunter-gatherer communities far from the epicenter. A suite of other volcanic impacts on human health and well-being may also have played a role. Whatever the precise mechanism, the finding demonstrates that a catastrophic eruption can reshape human demography across an entire region, not only in its immediate blast zone.

Taken together, these divergent regional trajectories paint a picture of disaster response that is contingent, uneven and deeply human. Senior author Peter Jordan, professor in archaeology at Lund University, emphasizes that the eruption must have been devastating, exploding out of the sea bed with little warning, battering the Japanese islands with powerful earthquakes and enormous tsunamis, and then blanketing the landscape with meters of volcanic ash. Yet the study shows that even in the most impossible situations, survivors and communities have choices, however limited. They need to act and make decisions, to adjust, to collaborate and to find new connections and social networks. The archaeological record of the Kikai-Akahoya aftermath captures exactly these processes: migration, alliance-building, economic reinvention and the gradual reweaving of social life in the shadow of a catastrophe.

The research also carries broader implications for how scientists and societies think about disasters today. By demonstrating how unpredictable and complex the aftermath of a major disaster can be, the study helps create a deeper understanding of the contingent ways in which cultures and societies cope with sudden shocks and catastrophes. The Jomon foragers of mid-Holocene Japan had no warning systems, no emergency services and no external aid, yet their responses, migration toward refugia, concentration along productive coastlines, and innovation in subsistence strategies, echo patterns familiar from modern disaster studies. The lesson from seven millennia ago is that demographic outcomes after catastrophe are not predetermined by the scale of the event itself, but emerge from the interplay of pre-existing population conditions, environmental recovery rates, mobility and the social capacity of survivors to reorganize.

For archaeologists, the Kikai-Akahoya eruption offers a rare natural experiment: a single, precisely dated, regionally variable catastrophe whose effects can be read in the layers of ash and the traces of human activity above and below them. The new study replaces a decades-old binary debate, total apocalypse versus local survival, with a far richer account in which some regions declined before the disaster even struck, others absorbed refugees and kept growing, coastal communities reinvented themselves around marine resources, and distant populations faltered for reasons that may connect to climate, animal health or wider volcanic impacts. In doing so, it reminds us that the deepest lessons of past disasters concern not the violence of nature but the resourcefulness of the people who endured it.

Subject of Research: Demographic responses of Jomon forager societies to the Kikai-Akahoya volcanic eruption in mid-Holocene Japan

Article Title: How one of Earth’s worst volcanic disasters affected societies

Article References: How one of Earth’s worst volcanic disasters affected societies. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Kikai-Akahoya eruption, Jomon, volcanic disaster, archaeology, demography, prehistoric Japan, Kyushu, hunter-gatherers, Science Advances, Lund University, tsunami, population resilience

The point itself is a classic example of what archaeologists call a plain point, a barbless projectile head belonging to the broad Type 1 category first defined by J. G. D. Clark in his 1936 study of Mesolithic settlement in northern Europe. Straight in profile, oval to subcircular in cross-section, and tapering to a conical tip and a long, pointed conical base, the artefact was carved from the metapodial bone of a large ruminant. What makes it extraordinary is not its shape, which has parallels across the European Plain, but the survival of a circumferential band of dark residue about 8 millimetres wide and up to a millimetre thick, preserved roughly 6.5 centimetres from the base, exactly where a hunter would have seated the point into its haft.

Because plain points are notoriously difficult to date on morphology alone, the research team, led by Justyna Orłowska and Grzegorz Osipowicz of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń together with colleagues from the Lithuanian Institute of History and Vilnius University, took the unusual step of radiocarbon dating the adhesive itself. A 7.1-milligram sample of the residue, removed with an ethanol-cleaned scalpel, was analysed by accelerator mass spectrometry at the Poznań Radiocarbon Laboratory. The uncalibrated result of 8840 plus or minus 40 years before present calibrates, using the IntCal20 curve, to between 10,154 and 9,711 calibrated years before present, or roughly 8205 to 7762 cal BC. That makes the Garnys point the oldest directly radiocarbon-dated plain bone point of this morphological type from Lithuania, and one of the oldest osseous projectile points yet dated in the country.

Identifying the animal that supplied the raw material required a different toolkit. Macroscopic examination suggested a large cervid metapodial, but poor collagen preservation limited the ZooMS analysis, a technique that fingerprints collagen peptides by MALDI-ToF mass spectrometry, to just five diagnostic markers. Even so, the preserved marker set was sufficient to assign the bone to the deer family, and when combined with the artefact’s dimensions and cortical thickness, the evidence points most plausibly to an elk, Alces alces, metatarsal. Red deer and roe deer cannot be entirely excluded, but fallow deer can be ruled out outright, since the species never occurred naturally in prehistoric Lithuania.

Under the microscope, the point tells the story of its own manufacture. High- and low-magnification wear analysis at the Traceology Laboratory in Toruń revealed that the lateral edges, tip and base were shaped by flat scraping, leaving characteristic multi-planar surface bands that survive best near the base, where they were shielded by the haft. The tip also shows probable remnants of rough scraping with a denticulated tool, and linear, unidirectional sheen across the surface indicates that the finished point was deliberately burnished. The tip is broken, but the fracture is non-diagnostic, and the researchers note that post-depositional damage in the riverbed appears the more likely cause than an impact in flight.

The chemical identity of the black residue was resolved through two complementary techniques. Attenuated total reflectance Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, applied first as a rapid, minimally destructive screen, produced a spectrum closely comparable to experimentally produced birch bark tar, showing aliphatic carbon-hydrogen stretching bands, carbonyl absorptions and carbon-oxygen bands typical of an oxygenated, triterpenoid-rich organic material. Because such functional groups are not individually diagnostic, the team turned to gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. The chromatographic profile of the underivatised solvent extract matched the experimental birch tar reference closely, particularly in the retention-time region of lupane-type triterpenoids, and two principal peaks corresponded in both retention time and mass spectra to analytical standards of lupeol and betulin, the signature compounds of birch bark transformed by heating under oxygen-limited conditions.

The researchers are careful about what this identification does and does not prove. Lupeol and betulin also occur naturally in birch bark, so they are interpreted within the broader chromatographic pattern and archaeological context rather than as standalone markers, and the GC-MS data characterise only the solvent-soluble, gas-chromatography-amenable fraction of the residue. Even with those caveats, the finding is remarkable. Birch bark tar is a thermally transformed product, made by dry-distilling bark, and its presence on a weapon from the ninth millennium BC in the southeastern Baltic adds a crucial data point to a growing map of Mesolithic adhesive use that stretches from Star Carr in Britain to the Dutch North Sea seabed and the Early Mesolithic site of Krzyż Wielkopolski 7 in Poland.

Perhaps the most vivid insights come from the hafting traces themselves. Beyond the adhesive band, the point preserves distinct impressions of wrapping and compression marks near the base, and within the tar itself the researchers identified a clear imprint of a fibre strand, almost certainly from the binding material. Taken together with the adhesive’s distribution, the evidence points to a specific assembly sequence: the point was inserted into a socketed shaft, bound with fibrous ligatures, and then sealed with birch tar, which would have strengthened the joint and improved its water resistance. Unlike the side-mounted bone points known from sites such as Friesack IV, Ulkestrup Lyng and Krzyż Wielkopolski 7, the Garnys evidence more closely supports a non-detachable point mounted in a socketed shaft, a configuration the team has reconstructed in a step-by-step illustration.

What was the weapon for? Unbarbed points are generally interpreted as heads for lances or spears, and they may also have served as central prongs in multi-tined leisters used for fishing. The Garnys point’s broken tip prevents a definitive functional attribution, but its morphology and its riverine context are consistent with a lance or spearhead deployed in aquatic settings, perhaps for fishing or for hunting semi-aquatic mammals such as beaver and otter, both documented targets of bone-point weaponry in the ethnographic and archaeological record. Beaver remains make up roughly 7 to 10 percent of the faunal assemblage at Garnys 1, lending contextual weight to that interpretation.

The Garnys 1 site itself, discovered in 2017 and investigated since, has yielded hundreds of wooden, osseous, lithic and ceramic artefacts from a riverbed with exceptional organic preservation, and radiocarbon dates on other barbed bone points from the same stretch of river cluster in the Mesolithic, around 7700 to 7300 cal BC. Together with the new dating, the point confirms that the Žeimena River corridor was intensively used by hunter-gatherer-fishers across the Mesolithic, Subneolithic and Neolithic. More broadly, the study demonstrates how wear analysis, biomolecular fingerprinting and organic chemistry can be woven together to extract a full biography from a single artefact, especially in waterlogged contexts where even adhesives and surface deposits survive. For a region where most osseous points are contextless stray finds, the Garnys point offers a rare, precisely dated and technologically legible window into the craftsmanship of Europe’s early postglacial hunters.

Subject of Research: Interdisciplinary analysis of an early Mesolithic osseous projectile point with birch bark tar adhesive from the Garnys 1 site, Lithuania

Article Title: An early mesolithic osseous projectile point from the Garnys 1 site, Lithuania: interdisciplinary analysis of a rare find from the East Baltic Plain

Article References: Orłowska, J., Bosiak, M., Piličiauskas, G., Piličiauskienė, G., Matiukas, A., & Osipowicz, G. (2026). An early mesolithic osseous projectile point from the Garnys 1 site, Lithuania: interdisciplinary analysis of a rare find from the East Baltic Plain. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 18(10), Article 211. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-026-02576-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12520-026-02576-5

Keywords: Mesolithic, bone projectile point, birch bark tar, Lithuania, Garnys 1, ZooMS, GC-MS, radiocarbon dating, hafting, hunter-gatherers, East Baltic, underwater archaeology

The research, published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, was conducted by Jesse Tune, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Mississippi and director of its Center for Archaeological Research, together with Shane Miller, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama. The pair focused on two of the best-known early projectile point traditions in southeastern North America: Clovis and Cumberland. Clovis points, associated with some of the earliest known inhabitants of the region and dated to around 13,200 years ago, represent the first generations of colonists feeling their way through unfamiliar terrain. Cumberland points, which appeared several hundred years later, belong to a population that inherited a landscape already mapped, at least in part, by the people who came before them. By comparing how the two groups treated their stone weapons, the researchers were able to read patterns of risk, mobility and knowledge directly out of the archaeological record.

The technical logic behind the study rests on a well-established principle in lithic analysis: the way a stone tool is reduced over its use life reflects the economic decisions of the person carrying it. Chert, a fine-grained sedimentary rock that fractures predictably and holds a sharp edge, was the raw material of choice for these weapons. But chert outcrops are not evenly distributed, and for a newly arrived group that did not yet know where to find them, every piece of usable stone had to be treated as precious. Tune and Miller found that Clovis points in the Tennessee River Valley were more likely to have been resharpened, worked down and maintained well past the point where a more secure forager might have simply replaced them. That pattern of intensive reduction, the authors argue, is a signature of resource uncertainty, a material expression of people who could not be sure where their next piece of toolstone would come from.

What makes this finding striking is that spear points were, in a sense, designed to be disposable. Mobile hunter-gatherers of the late Pleistocene did not hang on to possessions the way modern people do; a point that had done its job could be discarded and a new one knapped from a fresh piece of chert in a matter of minutes, provided the knapper knew where to find the stone. The Clovis pattern of clinging to and resharpening their points therefore stands out. As Tune explained, these were people who looked, acted and had the same needs as humans today, but they were living in a world dominated by megafauna and filled with unknowns. The points themselves are only a tiny sliver of their lives, yet through that sliver the researchers can glimpse the broader structure of their decisions: how far they traveled, how carefully they budgeted their gear, and how much they trusted their own map of the world.

The Cumberland points tell a very different story. By the time Cumberland people moved through the same valley several hundred years later, the locations of chert deposits and other critical resources had apparently been passed down or otherwise transmitted across generations. The evidence lies in the raw material itself: the researchers could determine where the stone used in a given point had been quarried, roughly when the point was made, and how many times it had been reworked. Cumberland points show clear signs of multiple episodes of use and resharpening, but they were rarely broken so badly that they could no longer function. That raises an intriguing question the researchers pose directly: if a point was still usable, why did it end up in what was essentially the trash, and from there in the archaeological record?

The answer, according to Tune and Miller, is confidence. A forager who knows exactly where the next outcrop of high-quality chert lies can afford to abandon a worn but serviceable point, because replacing it carries little risk. Discarding useable tools is therefore not carelessness but a marker of landscape knowledge, evidence that Cumberland people had learned where to gather new resources and had become comfortable in their surroundings. The contrast with Clovis is a contrast between two stages of colonization: the first, in which every tool must be squeezed for maximum utility because the future is uncertain, and the second, in which accumulated knowledge allows a more relaxed, almost profligate economy of stone. In this sense, a pile of discarded spearheads is not just debris; it is a record of how fast information about a continent spread through the small, mobile bands that were its first human residents.

The study also highlights the practical constraints that shaped these decisions. As Miller pointed out, the people moving through the valley had no pack animals. Everything they owned had to be carried on their backs, which imposed a hard limit on how much raw material and how many tools any individual could transport. Foragers had to be judicious in balancing what they needed against what they could bear, and that arithmetic changed as their knowledge of the landscape grew. A well-informed traveler could lighten the load, knowing that stone could be replenished along the route, while an uninformed one had to hedge against the possibility of long stretches without usable rock. The projectile points, in effect, encode the outcome of thousands of small calculations about weight, distance and risk, calculations that every mobile forager performed constantly.

Methodologically, the work is notable for the scale and character of its sample. There are relatively few excavated sites from the earliest occupation of the southeastern United States, and digging new ones is a slow, expensive and increasingly constrained enterprise. What exists in abundance instead are the points themselves, collected over decades by professional archaeologists and avocational collectors across the Tennessee River Valley. By treating these surface finds as a large comparative dataset rather than as isolated curiosities, Tune and Miller were able to extract behavioral signals that a single site could never provide. Their approach draws on foraging theory, a framework from behavioral ecology that models how mobile hunter-gatherers decide where to go, what to exploit and what to carry, and applies it to the measurable attributes of stone tools: their raw material sources, their degree of reduction and their condition at discard.

The researchers are quick to note that the questions they are asking are not confined to the deep past. Humans today face structurally similar problems whenever they move into unfamiliar territory, and Tune draws a direct line between Ice Age foragers and modern space exploration. Sending missions and rovers to Mars, he argues, involves the same fundamental process: entering an unknown environment, deciding what to take, learning the available resources and slowly expanding the zone of confident activity. The knowledge that accumulates must be encoded, carried and passed on, whether it is stored in the resharpening history of a chert point or in the operating procedures of a planetary mission. What has changed, in his view, is only the technology; the underlying problem of managing risk with incomplete information is unchanged.

That continuity is part of what gives the study its broad appeal. The people who knapped Clovis points were not primitive prototypes but modern humans solving modern problems with the materials at hand, and their solutions left fingerprints that archaeologists can still read nearly thirteen millennia later. A resharpened edge records anxiety about the future; a useable point tossed into a streambed records the security of knowing the land. By listening to what stone can tell them, Tune and Miller have turned one of archaeology’s most common artifacts into a sensitive instrument for measuring one of humanity’s oldest achievements: the conversion of a strange landscape into a known home, one generation of accumulated knowledge at a time.

Subject of Research: Late Pleistocene projectile point reduction strategies and landscape knowledge among early human colonizers of the Tennessee River Valley

Article Title: Ancient tools reveal how Ice Age humans learned the land

Article References: Ancient tools reveal how Ice Age humans learned the land. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Clovis, Cumberland points, Tennessee River Valley, projectile points, chert, Ice Age, hunter-gatherers, foraging theory, lithic analysis, landscape colonization, Pleistocene megafauna, archaeology

Personal ornamentation is far more than decoration. To archaeologists, beads and pendants are a vital proxy for symbolic behaviour and technological complexity, encapsulating everything from raw material collection and environmental knowledge to manufacturing skill and patterns of use and discard. As one of the hallmark expressions of Homo sapiens arriving in Europe, ornaments are especially crucial for investigating the technological knowledge and non-utilitarian practices of the first modern human groups on the Iberian Peninsula. Yet detailed functional analyses of such assemblages remain surprisingly scarce, which is what makes the Foradada study stand out.

The research team, led by Oriol Montero-Buch of the Universitat d’Alacant together with Ester Verdún-Castelló, Magdalena Gómez-Puche, Josep A. Casabó and Javier Fernández-López de Pablo, subdivided the cave’s ornament record into three distinct assemblages using stratigraphic and contextual criteria: an Early Upper Palaeolithic group, a mixed Upper Palaeolithic group and a Holocene group. This careful separation allowed the researchers to focus on the earliest phase, when modern humans were first establishing themselves in the region, while acknowledging the complexities introduced by later occupations of the cave.

The assemblage comprises thirty-five finished ornaments, alongside elements related to technical failures and accumulations of raw material. That combination is exceptionally informative, because it captures the entire life history of ornament production rather than just the end products. The range of materials selected is impressively broad, stretching from terrestrial mammal teeth to both marine and freshwater mollusc shells. This diversity suggests that the cave’s inhabitants possessed an intimate understanding of multiple ecological zones, from inland hunting territories to the nearby coastline, and deliberately targeted specific raw materials for ornamental purposes.

To unlock the secrets of these objects, the team employed a combined technological and traceological approach. Technological analysis examines the chaîne opératoire, the sequence of operations involved in producing each ornament, from raw material selection through perforation to final finishing. Traceology, or use-wear analysis, reads the microscopic marks left on the surfaces of the objects, revealing how they were suspended, how they moved against one another or against clothing, and how they ultimately came to be discarded. Together, these methods allowed the researchers to characterise the full biography of each bead and pendant, from manufacture through use to disposal.

Perhaps the most striking finding came from Raman spectroscopy, a non-destructive analytical technique that identifies mineral compounds by the way they scatter laser light. This analysis identified evidence of colour modification technology on the ornaments, meaning that some of the beads or shells had been deliberately treated to alter their colour, most likely with iron oxide pigments such as ochre. This represents one of the earliest documented uses of such colour modification on personal ornaments during the Early Upper Palaeolithic in the Iberian Peninsula, adding the region to the growing map of early pigment use across Eurasia and underscoring that these small objects carried aesthetic and symbolic significance that went beyond their natural appearance.

Comparative analysis with nearby regional ornamental assemblages revealed clear similarities between Foradada and other contemporary collections in the surrounding region. In the study of early modern human groups, ornament types can function rather like cultural fingerprints, and such shared patterns potentially point to common social networks and ethno-cultural identities linking communities across eastern Iberia. Recent large-scale European studies of Aurignacian and Gravettian ornaments have suggested that distinct ornamental traditions may correspond to distinct cultural groups, and the Foradada material now contributes an important data point from the Iberian Mediterranean margins to this emerging continental picture.

The researchers argue that the Foradada assemblage constitutes a significant collection of personal ornaments on the Iberian Peninsula during the Early Upper Palaeolithic, a period for which well-preserved and well-studied ornament assemblages remain comparatively rare in this part of Europe. The cave’s location, close to what would have been a dramatically different Late Pleistocene coastline, makes it a particularly valuable window onto how early coastal hunter-gatherer communities integrated marine resources, both dietary and symbolic, into their lives. Previous work at the site has already documented shellfish consumption during this period, and the ornament study now shows that shells also served as vehicles of identity and meaning.

Beyond its regional importance, the study makes a methodological case that is likely to resonate across Palaeolithic archaeology. The authors assess the potential value of integrating techno-functional analysis with spectroscopic methods as a way to add evidence on hunter-gatherer procurement strategies and their relationship with the environment. By combining microscopic reading of manufacturing and wear traces with mineralogical identification of pigment residues, archaeologists can extract far richer narratives from small ornamental objects than either technique alone could provide. Applied more widely, this integrated approach promises to illuminate not only how beads were made and used, but also where their raw materials came from, how far they may have travelled, and what that can reveal about the mobility and exchange networks of Europe’s earliest modern human societies.

For now, the ornaments of Cova Foradada stand as quiet testimony to a world nearly forty millennia past: a time when small groups of modern humans, perched between mountains and a cold sea on the edge of Europe, were already investing time, skill and meaning in the objects they wore against their skin. In their perforated teeth and pigmented shells, the first Iberian sapiens left behind a durable record of who they were, who they knew, and how they wished to be seen.

Subject of Research: Early Upper Palaeolithic personal ornaments and symbolic behaviour in eastern Iberia

Article Title: Early Upper Palaeolithic personal ornaments from Foradada cave (Xàbia, Alacant, Eastern Iberia)

Article References: Montero-Buch, O., Verdún-Castelló, E., Gómez-Puche, M., Casabó, J. A., & Fernández-López de Pablo, J. (2026). Early Upper Palaeolithic personal ornaments from Foradada cave (Xàbia, Alacant, Eastern Iberia). Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 18(10), Article 208. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-026-02555-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12520-026-02555-w

Keywords: personal ornaments, Early Upper Palaeolithic, Foradada cave, Iberia, shell beads, perforated teeth, Raman spectroscopy, traceology, symbolic behaviour, hunter-gatherers, social networks, ochre