Avec l’avancée de nos connaissances sur la variabilité climatique de la dernière période glaciaire en Europe, une meilleure précision des simulations paléoclimatiques et le développement d’algorithmes prédictifs, il est aujourd’hui possible d’aborder sur de nouvelles bases la relation entre environnement et culture au Paléolithique supérieur. Cette étude expose les résultats de l’application de la modélisation de niches éco-culturelles (Eco-Cultural Niche Modeling) au Badegoulien (culture archéologique de la fin du Dernier Maximum Glaciaire). L’application de deux architectures prédictives – Genetic Algorithm for Rule-Set Prediction (GARP) et Maximum Entropy (Maxent) – à partir des données archéologiques, paléoclimatiques et géographiques, nous a permis de reconstituer la niche écologique propre à cette culture. Les résultats obtenus montrent que les deux territoires définis à partir de la circulation des matières premières lithiques au Badegoulien correspondent à des conditions environnementales légèrement distinctes mais qui appartiennent à la même niche écologique.This study details an application of Eco-Cultural Niche Modeling (ECNM) aimed at examining the ecological context of the Badegoulian archaeological culture during the middle and later part of the Last Glacial Maximum in France, using two modeling architectures – the Genetic Algorithm for Rule-Set Prediction (GARP) and Maximum Entropy (Maxent). We reconstructed the ecological niche of the Badegoulian and also assessed whether eco-cultural variability existed within the technocomplex. We identified two broad but distinct territories within the Badegoulian based on lithic raw material circulation and used randomization-based tools to compare the eco-cultural niches estimated for these two territories, taking into account the use or non-use of conditions within the dispersal range of the human populations in question. In order to examine patterns of eco-cultural niche similarity, we used ENMTool’s (Warren et al., 2008 and 2010) niche overlap measures and the associated background similarity test. The overlap measures compare two maps (in this case, the eco-cultural niche reconstructions for the two Badegoulian territories) and measure the similarity between them. The background similarity test then evaluates whether the observed degree of similarity between the two maps is greater than would be expected by chance. We defined a background area for each of the Badegoulian territories based on a generalization of lithic raw material transport within the Badegoulian. This was accomplished by establishing a buffer with a radius of 175 km centered on clusters of recorded archaeological sites within each territory. When creating these buffers, we also kept intact the boundary
between the northern and southern territories since there are no known instances of lithic raw material circulation between the two. The predicted geographic range of the ecological niche reconstructed for the Badegoulian technocomplex as a whole covers much of present-day France, extending north into southern Belgium and south into the northern third of the Iberian Peninsula, although the known distribution of the
Badegoulian does not extend into either of the two regions. The eco-cultural niche reconstructions for the two lithic raw material circulation networks show an overlap in the southern portion of the present-day region of
Poitou-Charentes, the western part of the Limousin region, and southwards along the western margin of the Massif Central. The background similarity tests indicate that these two Badegoulian territories are interpredictive and thus occupy the same ecological niche. However, the northern territory is associated with ecological conditions that are slightly cooler and more humid than those of the southern territory. We propose that the identified Badegoulian lithic raw material circulation networks reflect distinct social territories associated with particular conditions within a single ecological niche. The relationship between these territories and ecological factors has interesting implications, considering that they share a common lithic technology. We argue that the trend towards territoriality observed in the Upper Solutrean (Banks et al., 2009) carries over into the Badegoulian, during which time territories become more distinct, even if the distinction is not readily apparent in terms of stone tool types. This study illustrates the utility of combining ecological niche reconstructions with archaeological data to identify and evaluate diachronic trends in cultural continuity for situations in which such patterns may be missed when the focus is solely on lithic technology and typology.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
