Chairs
Professor Nicky Milner, University of York
Professor Nicky Milner, University of York
Professor Nicky Milner completed her BA in Archaeology at Nottingham and a PhD at Cambridge in 1998. She received a Sir James Knott fellowship at the University of Newcastle and then a lectureship, before moving to the University of York in 2004. Her research focuses on the Mesolithic period and the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition and tends to divide across three key themes: palaeodiet and consumption practices; settlement and mobility; death and burial. She has worked on shell midden sites in Denmark, Ireland, Scotland, Spain and Portugal and excavated on many sites including Star Carr. She currently runs the ERC funded POSTGLACIAL project associating climatic and environmental data with evidence for human occupation in Britain, shortly after the end of the last Ice Age.
13:30-14:00
Solving for the unknown: the dynamics of drowned archaeological landscapes and early marine resources use. Examples off northwestern Australia
Dr Ingrid Ward, Flinders University
Abstract
Occupation in Australia is now dated back to 50 ky BP, and for the bulk of this period sea level was lower than present. Nearly one-third of Australia’s landmass, hence a significant part of the archaeological record, was drowned by the post-glacial transgression. Despite this, research aimed at finding submerged prehistoric archaeology on the drowned shelf is only just beginning. Over the next few years, a pioneering, multi-disciplinary study of submerged landscape archaeology will investigate the records of the now-submerged Pilbara coast in NW Australia (spanning 50 to 7 ky BP) and contribute a unique southern hemisphere insight into world prehistory. For Australia’s NW Shelf, knowledge is increasing rapidly on its preserved drowned palaeoshorelines through use of high-resolution remote sensing data, palaeotidal and 3D modelling. Computer-based visualisations, which overlay relative post-glacial sea levels on the modern bathymetry, help conceptual understanding of the changing coastal landscape. However, the past development of coastal resources, their potential human use and the preservation of this in the archaeological record is primarily controlled not by sea level per se but by second and third-order effects associated with variations in coastal sedimentary environments. Considering such physical processes in archaeological thinking will help and improve targeted prospection of submerged cultural sites, and will help stimulate new ways to include such information in conceptual models of human occupation and help us solve for the unknown.
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Dr Ingrid Ward, Flinders University
Dr Ingrid Ward, Flinders University
Dr Ward's background is multidisciplinary, including geological and archaeological research of terrestrial and marine environments. She has worked in Australian and UK academic, consultancy and regulatory organisations, including English Heritage, where she became interested in submerged landscapes of the southern North Sea. Since returning to Australia in 2011, she has promoted work on the prehistory of submerged landscapes, particularly off NW Australia. In the last few years she has performed geoarchaeological research on an offshore island site (Barrow Island), where cave records preserve a record of occupation from ~ 53 ky BP and provides the earliest Australasian evidence for marine resource use by modern humans. Recently, with European and Australian colleagues, we have received funding to explore what is known to Indigenous Australians as Sea Country. This 3-yr project will investigate submerged sites off the Pilbara coast spanning ~ 50 ka, providing a unique southern hemisphere insight into world prehistory.
14:15-14:45
The Bering Land Bridge during the last glacial maximum: a good place to live?
Dr Nancy Bigelow, University of Alaska
Abstract
Human DNA evidence of living populations suggests that between ~30,000 and ~15,000 yr BP, people paused in their migration into the New World from Siberia. Where did they pause? Was the now-submerged Bering Land Bridge (BLB) a suitable place to live? Vegetation reconstructions based on a variety of proxies (pollen, plant macrofossils, aDNA) indicate wide-spread herb-dominated tundra on the BLB, though there is intriguing evidence that woody taxa may have been more abundant than is generally assumed. Full glacial and late glacial pollen distribution maps from across Beringia, of which the BLB is only the central region, suggest in situ expansion of key taxa (cottonwood/aspen, spruce, pine, birch, and alder) and not migration from outside the region. In addition, DNA results on modern spruce indicate long isolation of Alaskan populations from those growing south of the Laurentide ice sheet, suggesting that some Alaskan populations could have survived the last glacial age in Beringia. Finally, some localities on the BLB may have been somewhat mesic, thus providing suitable habitat for the woody taxa to occupy. However, issues with chronology, site taphonomy, and pollen-vegetation linkages do cloud the issue. This presentation summarises current data on the BLB and adjacent regions and presents the pros and cons of the BLB as a suitable landscape for long-term human occupation.
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Dr Nancy Bigelow, University of Alaska
Dr Nancy Bigelow, University of Alaska
Vegetation and landscape change in Beringia (the Bering Land Bridge and adjacent landmasses) are the foci of Nancy Bigelow's research. Using pollen and plant macrofossil remains, she reconstructs Beringian landscape at a variety of spatial scales and over a variety of time periods from the Last Interglacial (125,000 years ago) through the late Holocene. Most recently her interests have focused on the landscape as people would have encountered it. Specifically, were woody plants present, either during the last ice age, or at high elevations during the Holocene? Has there been anthropogenic alteration of the landscape? And do large-scale vegetation groups (biomes) shed light on local plant availability? Bigelow’s research is highly collaborative and it is only through multi-proxy studies that these questions can be addressed.
15:30-16:00
Pathways to Ancient Britain
Dr Rachel Bynoe, University of Southampton
Abstract
The Pleistocene occupation of northwest Europe occurred during a period characterised by significant climatic changes. In Britain, hominin populations were present discontinuously through varied climates, from cool continental sites such as Happisburgh 1 and 3, to the balmy Mediterranean conditions of Pakefield. Whilst apparently able to survive through a range of conditions, the configuration of these landscapes, in particular the presence or absence of a land connection with the continent, would have had a fundamental impact on the density of hominin occupation in Britain at any given time. Similarly, the ecologies once present in the now-drowned North Sea Basin and Channel regions would presumably have played an important role in attracting and sustaining sporadic hominin populations. However, our understanding of the physical and environmental character of these landscapes, as well as the timing of transgressive and regressive periods, remains frustratingly murky, hindering the ability to imagine how these landscapes may have been used. A growing body of data from recent research and commercial offshore development is, however, beginning to address this issue: we can now start to piece together a more coherent picture of landscapes through time, but there is still an immense amount of work to do. By drawing some of this recent work together, this paper will discuss the potential configuration of these landscapes throughout the Pleistocene, the impact of fluctuating climatic changes upon them and the resulting implications for the hominins they sustained.
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Dr Rachel Bynoe, University of Southampton
Dr Rachel Bynoe, University of Southampton
Rachel is a Palaeolithic archaeologist specialising in submerged archaeology, particularly of the North Sea basin. She completed her PhD at the University of Southampton in 2014 looking at the use of historic faunal remains to locate extant Pleistocene deposits in the North Sea. In the intervening years she has lectured on both Palaeolithic and maritime courses and continued to work on terrestrial and submerged sites, including the only diver-groundtruthed Pleistocene sites in the UK. Currently Rachel is in the middle of a post-doctoral research position at the Natural History Museum as part of the Pathways to Ancient Britain project, concentrating on developing methods to locate and investigate the submerged deposits off Happisburgh, Norfolk.
16:15-16:45
Beringia and the Arctic: submerged landscapes and receding glaciers
Professor Emeritus E. James Dixon, University of New Mexico
Abstract
Events following the last glacial maximum (LGM) in high latitudes of North America illustrate the “push–pull” impacts of rising sea level and glacial recession on human and biotic communities. These forcing mechanisms transformed northern North America resulting in: 1) separating the vast land connection between Asia and North America, 2) joining the Arctic and Pacific Oceans, 3) landward retreat (push) of human and near-shore biotic communities in response to rising sea level, and 4) the colonization (pull) of biota and humans in newly deglaciated regions. Understanding and quantifying the timing and mechanisms of this dramatic reconfiguration of North America provides insights for the application of complex systems modeling to geographically predict and scale future “push-pull” events likely to result from climate change.
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Professor Emeritus E. James Dixon, University of New Mexico
Professor Emeritus E. James Dixon, University of New Mexico
E. James Dixon served as Professor of Anthropology and Curator of Archeology at the University of Alaska Museum from (1974–1993). He became curator of archeology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in 1993 and subsequently (2001–2007) joined the faculty at the University of Colorado as Professor of Anthropology and Research Fellow at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. He served as Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico (2007–2016). After attending Fairleigh Dickenson University, he enrolled in the University of Alaska, Fairbanks where he received his B.A. and M.A., and then attended Brown University where he received his Ph.D. He was a Marshall Fellow for research at the National Museum of Denmark in 1972, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow in 1996-97, and awarded the Alaska Anthropological Association’s Professional Achievement Award in 2007. He specializes in North American archeology with particular focus on human colonization, high altitude and high latitude human adaptations, and early cultural development in the Americas. He has led many large research projects and advised and participated in numerous educational films, videos, and museum exhibitions. He also has lectured and published extensively including three books, Quest for the Origins of the First Americans (1993), Bones, Boats & Bison: Archaeology and the First Colonization of Western North America (1999), and Arrows and Atl Atls: A guide to the Archeology of Beringia (2013).