Animals and Humans in the Paleolithic

Overview of human-animal relationships in the deep past beyond subsistenc

Streams as Entanglement of Nature and Culture: European Upper Paleolithic River Systems and Their Role as Features of Spatial Organization

Large river valleys have long been seen as important factors to shape the mobility, communication, and exchange of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. However, rivers have been debated as either natural entities people adapt and react to or as cultural and meaningful entities people experience and interpret in different ways. Here, we attempt to integrate both perspectives. Building on theoretical work from various disciplines, we discuss the relationship between biophysical river properties and sociocultural river semantics and suggest that understanding a river's persona is central to evaluating its role in spatial organization. By reviewing the literature and analyzing European Upper Paleolithic site distribution and raw material transfer patterns in relation to river catchments, we show that the role of prominent rivers varies considerably over time. Both ecological and cultural factors are crucial to explaining these patterns. Whereas the Earlier Upper Paleolithic record displays a general tendency toward conceiving rivers as mobility guidelines, the spatial consolidation process after the colonization of the European mainland is paralleled by a trend of conceptualizing river regimes as frontiers, separating archaeological entities, regional groups, or local networks. The Late Upper Paleolithic Magdalenian, however, is characterized again by a role of rivers as mobility and communication vectors. Tracing changing patterns in the role of certain river regimes through time thus contributes to our growing knowledge of human spatial behavior and helps to improve our understanding of dynamic and mutually informed human-environment interactions in the Paleolithic

Streams as Entanglement of Nature and Culture: European Upper Paleolithic River Systems and Their Role as Features of Spatial Organization

Large river valleys have long been seen as important factors to shape the mobility, communication, and exchange of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. However, rivers have been debated as either natural entities people adapt and react to or as cultural and meaningful entities people experience and interpret in different ways. Here, we attempt to integrate both perspectives. Building on theoretical work from various disciplines, we discuss the relationship between biophysical river properties and sociocultural river semantics and suggest that understanding a river's persona is central to evaluating its role in spatial organization. By reviewing the literature and analyzing European Upper Paleolithic site distribution and raw material transfer patterns in relation to river catchments, we show that the role of prominent rivers varies considerably over time. Both ecological and cultural factors are crucial to explaining these patterns. Whereas the Earlier Upper Paleolithic record displays a general tendency toward conceiving rivers as mobility guidelines, the spatial consolidation process after the colonization of the European mainland is paralleled by a trend of conceptualizing river regimes as frontiers, separating archaeological entities, regional groups, or local networks. The Late Upper Paleolithic Magdalenian, however, is characterized again by a role of rivers as mobility and communication vectors. Tracing changing patterns in the role of certain river regimes through time thus contributes to our growing knowledge of human spatial behavior and helps to improve our understanding of dynamic and mutually informed human-environment interactions in the Paleolithic

Materiality, Agency and Evolution of Lithic Technology: an Integrated Perspective for Palaeolithic Archaeology

Considerations of materiality and object-oriented approaches have greatly influenced the development of archaeological theory in recent years. Yet, Palaeolithic archaeology has been slow in incorporating this emerging body of scholarship and exploring its bearing on the human deep past. This paper probes into the potential of materiality theory to clarify the material dynamics of the Plio-Pleistocene and seeks to re-articulate the debate on the evolution of our species with materiality discourses in archaeology and the humanities more broadly. We argue that the signature temporalities and geospatial scales of observation provided by the Palaeolithic record offer unique opportunities to examine the active role of material things, objects, artefacts and technologies in the emergence, stabilisation and transformation of hominin lifeworlds and the accretion of long-term trajectories of material culture change. We map three axes of human-thing relations-ecological, technical and evolutionary-and deploy a range of case studies from the literature to show that a critical re-assessment of material agency not only discloses novel insights and questions, but can also refine what we already know about the human deep past. Our exploration underscores the benefits of de-centring human behaviour and intentionality and demonstrates that materiality lends itself as a productive nexus of exchange and mutual inspiration for diverging schools and research interests in Palaeolithic archaeology. An integrated object-oriented perspective calls attention to the human condition as a product of millennial-scale human-thing co-adaptation, in the course of which hominins, artefacts and technologies continuously influenced and co-created each other

Kammern-Grubgraben. Neue Erkenntnisse zu den Grabungen 1985−1994. Archaeologia Austriaca|Archaeologia Austriaca Band 100/2016|

The open-air site of Kammern-Grubgraben is a rare example of a detailed glimpse of Ice-Age hunter-gatherer lifestyles during the latter part of the last glaciation of the northern hemisphere. Archaeological excavations were initially conducted between 1985 and 1990 (A. Montet-White/F. Brandtner) and from 1993 to 1994 (F. Brandtner/ B. Klíma). After the death of F. Brandtner, however, the inventory of the more recent excavations in the collection went without close examination. In a joint project between the Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Neugebauer-Maresch, Einwögerer) and the University of Cologne (Richter, Hussain) and University of Erlangen (Maier), this extensive find material was comprehensively documented and inventorised for the first time on behalf of the state of Lower Austria (MAMUZ), its legal owner. The contributions of Haesaerts and Damblon as well as Haesaerts et al. supplement this examination with a re-contextualisation and re-interpretation of the chronostratigraphy obtained during the initial excavations

Honing Tools of the Mind: A Dynamic Framework for the Study of Symbolic Behavior in Early Human Evolution

The emergence of symbolic behavior is often considered a hallmark development in hominin evolution, ultimately giving rise to the complex communicative practices, abstract reasoning patterns, aesthetic discourses and religious institutions surrounding us today. In recent years, archaeologists have provided substantial evidence for the remarkable time-depth of symbolic artifact utilization and have made groundbreaking methodological advances (e.g, with respect to dating techniques, microscopy and 3d modeling). However, a systematic and rigorous framework for the investigation of the symbolic function of past artifacts is still lacking, that is, what kind of purpose these tools may have served and what kind of symbolic work they were designed or co- opted to do. This paper responds to this lacuna and outlines a new conceptual framework for the investigation of early symbolic artifacts. Symbolic artifacts are special in the sense of being mind- directed as they do their work primarily in the social and cognitive domain. That is, they support their function only to the extent that their structural properties affect relevant cognitive processes related to symbolic cognition (including e.g., attention, memory, and discrimination). To inform our understanding of past symbolic behavior, we therefore introduce the concept of cognitive affordances, defined as the capacity of symbolic forms to support such relevant cognitive processes. The cognitive affordances constitute a mediating layer of analysis between the observable, structural traits of symbolic artifacts and their hypothesized role in past social and pragmatic behaviors of hominins, related to, for instance, aesthetic, communicative, or ritual/cosmological practices. We show that by studying the cognitive implications of variation and change in the structural properties of symbolic artifacts recovered from the archaeological record, we can inform inferences and test new hypotheses about what pragmatic functions they may have served in past Paleolithic society

Auf dem Weg zu einer gemeinschaftlichen Meta-Analyse des Endpaläolithikums/frühesten Mesolithikums in Europa. Bericht über den 2. CLIOARCH-Workshop, 26.-27. November 2020

We report on a virtual workshop aimed at advancing a new synthesis of techno-cultural patterns at the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary in Europe. We respond to the growing need of developing meta-analytical frameworks for comparing and eventually integrating disparate regional datasets and stress the opportunities of collaborative approaches. We propose that expert-sourced lithic data is a promising means of conducting systematic archaeological meta-analyses, and that the compilation and examination of similar continental-scale datasets may be an important research goal in the future.Wir berichten über den 2. Workshop im Rahmen des CLIOARCH-Projekts, der darauf abzielte, auf eine neue Synthese technokultureller Langzeitentwicklungen an der Pleistozän/Holozän-Grenze in Europa hinzuarbeiten. Wir reagieren damit auf den wachsenden Bedarf nach einem metaanalytischen Fundament für den Vergleich und die eventuelle Integration von heterogenen regionalen Datensätzen in der Archäologie des Spätpaläolithikums und frühesten Mesolithikums und betonen insbesondere die reichhaltigen Möglichkeiten, die kooperative Ansätze hierbei bieten. Wir schlagen vor, dass das Expert-Sourcing von vorgefilterten lithischen Informationen eine vielversprechende Grundlage zur Durchführung systematischer archäologischer MetaAnalysen ist und dass die Zusammenstellung, Untersuchung und Konservierung ähnlicher großräumiger Datensammlungen ein wichtiges Forschungsziel für die Zukunft sein könnte.CLIOARCH is an ERC Consolidator Grant project and has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 817564)

Al-Ansab and the Dead Sea: Mid-MIS 3 archaeology and environment of the early Ahmarian population of the Levantine corridor

Our field data from the Upper Palaeolithic site of Al-Ansab 1 (Jordan) and from a pollen sequence in the Dead Sea elucidate the role that changing Steppe landscapes played in facilitating anatomically modern human populations to enter a major expansion and consolidation phase, known as the „Early Ahmarian“, several millennia subsequent to their initial Marine Isotope Stage 4/3 migration from Africa, into the Middle East. The Early Ahmarian techno-cultural unit covers a time range between 45 ka–37 ka BP. With so far more than 50 sites found, the Early Ahmarian is the first fully Upper Palaeolithic techno-cultural unit exclusively and undisputedly related to anatomically modern human populations. In order to better understand the potentially attractive features of the Early Ahmarian environmental context that supported its persistence for over 8,000 years, we carried out a decennial research program in Jordan and in the Dead Sea. This included (1) a geoscientific and archaeological survey program in the Wadi Sabra (Jordan) with a particular focus on excavations at the Early Ahmarian site of Al-Ansab 1 alongside the detailed analysis of Quaternary sediments from the same area and (2) palaeobotanical research based on Quaternary lake deposits from the Dead Sea. Our pollen data from the Dead Sea indicate slow, low frequency vegetational variation with expanding Artemisia steppe, from 60 to 20 ka BP (MIS 3–2). Here, we see a reciprocal assimilation of southern and northern Levantine vegetation zones thereby enhancing a long-lasting south-to-north steppe corridor. The same integration process accelerated about 40 ka ago, when forested areas retreated in the Lebanese Mountains. The process then extended to encompass an area from Southern Lebanon to the Sinai Peninsula. We argue that, at the same time, the carriers of the Early Ahmarian techno-cultural unit extended their habitat from their original Mediterranean biome (in the North) to the Saharo-Arabian biome (to the South). Our excavation of Al-Ansab 1, a campsite at the eastern margins of the Early Ahmarian settlement area, indicates far reaching annual movements of small, highly mobile hunter-gatherer groups. We assume a low degree of settlement complexity, still allowing for habitat extension of the Early Ahmarian into the margins of the Levantine corridor. Due to our radiometric dates, our combined archaeological and environmental record sheds light on an evolved phase of the Early Ahmarian, around 38 ka ago, rather than the starting phase of this techno-cultural unit. Possible application of our model to the starting phase of the Early Ahmarian remains an aspect of future research