Chiquihuite Cave and Sima de las Golondrinas: two Pleistocene sites in Mexico and their place in the search for the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and pre-LGM human presence in the Americas

Dr. Ardelean's latest research focused on the earliest human occupations in the northern highlands of Mexico, where he conducted excavations between 2009 and 2020 while a professor at the University of Zacatecas. He is interested in American early prehistory and the peopling of the Americas, the Pleistocene environments and Pleistocene cultural diversity. He will talk about his finds in the "Pleistocene Hunters of the Northern Highlands Project", especially the earliest artifacts and “deep time” dates from Chiquihuite and Sima de las Golondrinas cave sites, discussing their importance within the current panorama of North American prehistoric archaeology. Ardelean’s working hypothesis, already backed up by a considerable corpus of data, is that humans were already inhabiting the Western Hemisphere before the onset of the last glacial stadial. At the moment, he is based in Ontario, working for the heritage resource management firm ASI.