AIA: Stanford welcomes Tristan Carter

Dr. Carter will be joining our Stanford AIA Chapter on Friday, April 17at 8:00pm,Packard Bldg., Room 101
Reception to follow. Lecture is free and open to the public.

Stanford AIA congratulates Dr. Carter on the receipt of the Cotsen Excavation Award for 2015 for the Stélida Naxos Archeological Project.

Located on the north-west coast of Naxos (Cyclades), the chert source of Stélida was first discovered in 1981. The evidence from this work and subsequent rescue excavations suggested strongly that the site – a quarry and stone tool workshop - was of early prehistoric date. In 2013 we initiated the Stélida Naxos Archaeological Project [SNAP], a two-year intensive geo-archaeological survey aimed at characterising the nature of the raw material, and its history and manner of exploitation. We can now report that Stélida was exploited from at least 260,000 years ago during the Lower Palaeolithic, likely by Homo heidelbergensis, followed by major activity in the Middle Palaeolithic by Neanderthals, then again in the Upper Palaeolithic by early Homo sapiens, and finally during the Mesolithic by the latest hunter-gatherer populations of the islands. With recent Pleistocene sea-level reconstructions suggesting that a landbridge existed between Anatolia and the southern Greek mainland (encompassing what today are the Aegean islands), the Stélida data is helping us to reconfigure our view of Greece from being a Pleistocene cul-de-sac, or refugium, to potentially a major route in early hominin dispersal.

For more information on Dr. Carter: https://www.anthropology.mcmaster.ca/faculty-1/stringy