Site Formation in Caves and Rockshelters

Caves and rockshelters are found all over the world in a wide variety of topographical, environmental and geomorphological contexts. As cavities, caves and rockshelters have the potential to act as sediment traps, protecting deposits from erosive landscape processes, and create spaces that are attractive to a wide range of organisms, including vertebrates, invertebrates, fungi and bacteria. The clastic and chemical sediments that accumulate in these spaces are used to reconstruct nuanced interpretations of human behavior as captured moments in time, or regional reconstructions of landscape, ecological and environmental change. Clastic and chemical sedimentary components can be introduced from outside (allogenic) or generated within (autogenic) by natural sedimentary processes (geogenic), or by animals (biogenic) and humans (anthropogenic). Once inside the cave or rockshelter, sediments can be modified over time through a wide range of secondary geogenic, biogenic and anthropogenic processes, creating complex sedimentary sequences with unique suites of mineral modifications. Through multidisciplinary, multiscale and multiproxy investigations, these processes can be identified and their implications for the clastic and chemical records that are so often drawn on in archaeological investigations understood. This entry aims to summarize the most significant of the site formation processes contributing to the formation of cave and rockshelter deposits. The entry samples pertinent and contemporary review and primary literature focusing on deposits, their formation and analysis from a geographical and temporal range that spans five continents and more than three million years.