Threading the weft, testing the warp: population concepts and the European Upper Paleolithic chronocultural framework

Interpretations of the European Upper Paleolithic archaeological record have long relied on concepts of past populations. In particular, cultural taxonomic units-which are used as a framework for describing the archaeological record-are commonly equated with past populations. However, our cultural taxonomy is highly historically contingent, and does not necessarily accurately reflect variation in the archaeological record. Furthermore, we lack a secure theoretical basis for the inference of populations from taxonomic units. In order to move past these problems and satisfactorily address questions of Upper Paleolithic populations, we need to entirely revise our approach to chronocultural framework building.Here, I outline a specific way of describing the archaeological record that deliberately avoids the use of cultural taxonomic units and instead concentrates on individual features of material culture. This approach may provide a more appropriate basis for the archaeological study of Upper Paleolithic populations and for comparison with genetic data