title: Pre-Clovis occupation 14,550 years ago at the Page-Ladson site, Florida, and the peopling of the Americas.
abstract: Stone tools and mastodon bones occur in an undisturbed geological context at the Page-Ladson site, Florida. Seventy-one radiocarbon ages show that ~14,550 calendar years ago (cal yr B.P.), people butchered or scavenged a mastodon next to a pond in a bedrock sinkhole within the Aucilla River. This occupation surface was buried by ~4 m of sediment during the late Pleistocene marine transgression, which also left the site submerged. Sporormiella and other proxy evidence from the sediments indicate that hunter-gatherers along the Gulf Coastal Plain coexisted with and utilized megafauna for ~2000 years before these animals became extinct at ~12,600 cal yr B.P. Page-Ladson expands our understanding of the earliest colonizers of the Americas and human-megafauna interaction before extinction.
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA.
authors.forename: Jessi J
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-1971-9416
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Halligan
authors.affiliation: Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA.; Department of Anthropology, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA.; Department of Geography, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA.
authors.forename: Michael R
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Waters
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA.
authors.forename: Angelina
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Perrotti
authors.affiliation: Department of Archaeology, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4QE, UK.; The Charles McBurney Laboratory for Geoarchaeology, Division of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3DZ, UK.
authors.forename: Ivy J
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-2692-0628
authors.initials: IJ
authors.lastname: Owens
authors.affiliation: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA.; Institute for Rock Magnetism, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA.
authors.forename: Joshua M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Feinberg
authors.affiliation: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA.; Institute for Rock Magnetism, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA.
authors.forename: Mark D
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-9597-8033
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Bourne
authors.affiliation: Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA.
authors.forename: Brendan
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-2378-7905
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Fenerty
authors.affiliation: Texas Memorial Museum, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78705, USA.
authors.forename: Barbara
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-7931-5237
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Winsborough
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA.
authors.forename: David
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-8641-3874
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Carlson
authors.affiliation: Museum of Paleontology and Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.
authors.forename: Daniel C
authors.initials: DC
authors.lastname: Fisher
authors.affiliation: Stafford Research Laboratories, Lafayette, CO 80026, USA.
authors.forename: Thomas W
authors.initials: TW
authors.lastname: Stafford
authors.affiliation: Aucilla Research Institute Inc., 555 North Jefferson Street, Monticello, FL 32344, USA.
authors.forename: James S
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-5694-0443
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Dunbar
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001106:Archaeology; D053476:Extinction, Biological; D005431:Florida; D005580:Fossils; D005843:Geography; D049690:History, Ancient; D006801:Humans; D011157:Population Dynamics; D055110:Radiometric Dating
keywords: Archaeology; Florida; Late Pleistocene; Megafauna Extinction; Page-Ladson; Paleoindian; Pre-Clovis; Prehistoric America; Sporormiella; underwater archaeology