Wild Things 2.0: Further Advances in Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Research

209 Pages·2019·10.267 MB·English

by  James Walker, David Clinnick, Helen Drinkall, Stephanie Piper

Wild Things 2
Further Advances in Palaeolithic
and Mesolithic Research
edited by
James Walker and David Clinnick
Oxford & Philadelphia
Published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by
OXBOW BOOKS
The Old Music Hall, 106–108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JE
and in the United States by
OXBOW BOOKS
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© Oxbow Books and the individual contributors 2019
Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-946-3
Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-947-0 (ePub)
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019949795
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Front cover: Body shape and relative size of male and female Alces alces, Cervus elpahus and Capreolus
capreolus. Drawing by Ben Elliott.
Contents
List of contributors .................................................................................................................v
1. Introduction: More wild things .......................................................................................1
James Walker and David Clinnick
2. A view from the tops: Combining an assemblage analysis and a Geographical
Information Systems approach to investigate upland site function and
landscape use in the Lower Palaeolithic of Britain .....................................................9
Helen C. Drinkall
3. Clovis and the implications of the peopling of North America ..............................35
Alan M. Slade
4. Experimental magnetic susceptibility signatures for identifying hearths
in the Mesolithic period in North East England, UK .................................................55
Lisa Snape and Mike J. Church
5. In the fringes, at the twilight: Encountering deer in the British Mesolithic ........81
Ben Elliott
6. Man’s best friend? A critical perspective on human-animal relations from
Natufian and Pre-Pottery Neolithic mortuary practices ..........................................97
Gabrielle Borenstein
7. Empathy, cognition and the response to death in the Middle Palaeolithic:
The emergence of postmortemism .............................................................................109
Suzi Wilson
8. Seeking the body: The nature of European Palaeolithic cave art and
installation art ................................................................................................................123
Takashi Sakamoto
9. Reflecting Magdalenian identities: Considering a functional duality for
Middle to Late Magdalenian antler projectile points ..............................................137
Michelle C. Langley
iv Contents
10. Concealing traces of ‘untamed’ fire: The Mesolithic pottery makers and
users of Japan ...............................................................................................................155
Makoto Tomii
11. N aming neanderthalensis in Newcastle, 1863: The politics of a
scientific meeting ........................................................................................................171
Miguel DeArce
12. George Busk and the remarkable Neanderthal ......................................................191
Paige Madison
List of contributors
Gabrielle borenstein ben elliott
Department of Anthropology School of Archaeology
261 McGraw PI University College Dublin
Ithaca Belfield
New York Dublin 4
14853, USA Ireland
[email protected] [email protected]
Mike J. ChurCh MiChelle C. lanGley
Department of Archaeology Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution
Durham University Environmental Futures Research Institute
South Road Griffith University
Durham Nathan
DH1 3LE Australia
UK [email protected]
[email protected]
PaiGe MaDison
DaviD ClinniCk Arizona State University
National Heritage Board of Singapore PO Box 874601
61 Stamford Road #03-08 Tempe
Singapore 178892 Arizona
[email protected] 85287, USA
[email protected]
MiGuel DearCe
Smurfit Institute alan M. slaDe
Department of Genetics Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory
Trinity College Dublin University of Texas at Austin
Ireland Austin
[email protected] Texas
78758, USA
helen C. Drinkall [email protected]
Department of Archaeology
Durham University lisa snaPe
Durham Department of Geography & Geology
DH1 3LE Paris-Lodron-Universität Salzburg
UK Hellbrunnerstrasse 34
[email protected] 5020 Salzburg
Austria
[email protected]
vi List of contributors
takashi sakaMoto JaMes Walker
Department of Archaeology School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences
Durham University University of Bradford
South Road Bradford
Durham BD7 1DP
DH1 3LE [email protected]
UK
[email protected] suzi Wilson
Department of Archaeology
Makoto toMii Durham University
Centre for Studies of Cultural Heritage and Durham
Inter Humanities, DH1 3LE
Graduate Schools of Letters, UK
Kyoto University, [email protected]
Yoshida-Honmachi,
Sakyo, Kyoto,
606-8501
Japan
[email protected]
Chapter 1
Introduction: More wild things
James Walker and David Clinnick
The first Wild Things volume was a compilation of papers given at a conference held
at Durham University focused on all things Palaeolithic and Mesolithic. The conference
was a great success, bringing together researchers from various different career stages,
from postgraduate through to emeriti. Additionally, with a wide and eclectic array of
subject matter being covered, the event fostered dialogue between researchers that
might not have otherwise been exposed to one another’s work. Recognition of this
fact was a key theme emphasised in the first volume: the amount of commonality –
things to be learned, in spite of the wide variety of topics being discussed (Foulds
et al. 2014). Perhaps traditionally isolative categories of research, be they spatial or
temporal, are more arbitrary than we have sometimes thought to admit. One of the
keynotes (perhaps better left anonymous!) was heard to remark – tongue in cheek, we
are sure – that they were ‘unaware and slightly jealous at how much interesting stuff
you lot [sic] have and are doing in the Mesolithic’. The feeling was (we are also sure)
quite reciprocated.
The success of the first conference and accompanying volume prompted a second
meeting, this time tied to the broader circulation of similarly themed conferences that,
with semi-regularity for a time, migrated annually around different institutions up
and down the UK. This second volume, however, is not a straightforward conference
proceedings – although various contributions were indeed included from the meeting.
With the first Wild Things volume, we were impressed with the diversity of research
showcased. Realising that this was an asset to be celebrated, the second volume serves
as a taster to highlight some of the many aspects of prehistoric research that are, in
varying ways, related to prehistoric research themes at the archaeology department
in Durham. Some contributions are directly related, coming from current or former
students, while for others the link is more tenuous – an overlap in research interests,
2 James Walker and David Clinnick
sometimes as colleagues or friends. We hope that the volume showcases the variety
of research connected to the department in some way, and, like its predecessor
volume, highlights the value of engaging with researchers from beyond the insulative
spheres of our own work.
In the first Wild Things volume, it was clear that there was much to be gained from
pushing researchers to go beyond traditionally limiting research frameworks such as
Mesolithic and Palaeolithic, and the diversity of this second volume partly reflects a
desire to push even further. This artificial divide has continued to erode, but we also
sought to include subject matter and authorship from further afield (Americas, Near
East and East Asia), in part as a reflection of the fact that terms such as Palaeolithic
and Mesolithic are often themselves used as geographic denominators, and are thus
restrictive terms spatially as well as chronologically. Some of the papers in this
volume deal with early hominins and human evolution, while others are firmly rooted
in AMH hunter-gatherer and early farming societies. Still other contributions – the
last two chapters – highlight the importance of reflexivity, and engaging with the
history of our discipline in order to better understand our current state of knowledge.
The ordering of the volume, explained below, provides a general route of
progression, but to retrospectively shoehorn a theme or narrative would be both
self-defeating and disingenuous; we prefer to let each entry stand alone, and, save for
some of the connecting links discussed here, for the reader to see some of the many
novel and different ways there are of grappling with various different questions of
the deep past, from early hominins to recent hunter-gatherers. If nothing else, they
show the field to be in a state of rude health.
Where the things are
Landscape-based studies are a vital component of ancient prehistoric archaeology, and
our volume opens with three studies that, among other things, could fairly be described
as innovative landscape-based approaches to the past. We have to think beyond the
discrete site-unit resolution that frames much of the material record if we are to
attempt to understand the various different ways in which hunter-gatherers perceive,
interact with and live in the landscape (Zvelebil and Moore 2006). If reconstructing
human landscapes from the early Holocene was not challenge enough, delving further
back in time entails working with an increasingly disparate and depauperate material
record, and a much greater time-lapse of landscape taphonomy, with multiple instances
of glacial advance and retreat. As the cover-art of Fairweather Eden – the popular
account of the Boxgrove excavations (Pitts and Roberts 1998) – evocatively portrayed,
with a scene from ancient Britain with humans and proboscideans living alongside
one another, the world must, at times, have been a very different place. It is not far
off from this particular different time and place that our volume begins.
We open with an innovative marriage of GIS landscape approaches and traditional
lithic-based analyses of Lower Palaeolithic assemblages from the south-east of
1. Introduction: More wild things 3
Britain. Relating differences in assemblage to particular places within the prehistoric
landscape is a crucial part of understanding variability and structured use of space.
In this respect, this chapter (Drinkall) provides a timely contribution to an area that
has undergone much development recently (see Coward et al. 2015) that assesses
broader questions of hominin evolution and human development from a landscape-
based perspective. Drinkall elicits a connection between site location, assemblage
composition and intervisibility that has previously been lacking from many accounts
of archaic hominins in northern Europe.
Moving on in time and place to the early prehistory of the Americas, our next
chapter (Slade) reflects upon diversity of environment and group interactions
as a factor in explaining assemblage patterns – in this case, the iconic Clovis
technocomplex. Although no longer regarded as the first Americans, the questions of
where the Clovis came from and how this relates to earlier, contemporary and later
technologies in the Americas remains at the fore of New World prehistory (Waters et
al. 2018). Using dated sites and associated faunal assemblages, Slade posits that rather
than a homogenous spread, as has sometimes been portrayed, the Clovis industry
comprises multiple regionalised developments within the broader bracket of the
famous fluted-point tradition.
Our fourth chapter (Snape-Kennedy and Church) takes us back across the Atlantic
to Britain once again, but this time to the Mesolithic of North East England, and the
question of settlement use. A number of Mesolithic structures have been uncovered
in recent decades (e.g. Waddington 2007), but the question of what constitutes
settlement evidence and how we recognise or interpret it has remained, since
the 1970s (Newell 1981), something of an enigma. Evidence of hearth-places, long
recognised as evidence of at least temporary settlement placement, offer some
routes forward for new analytical approaches. Here, Snape-Kennedy and Church have
developed one such approach built around complementing magnetic susceptibility
signatures with microcharcoal analysis in order to assess the archaeological visibility
of hearths. In doing so, they are able to highlight some of the drawbacks and potential
for archaeologists seeking to identify and interpret hearth remains from this period
using magnetic susceptibility – a vital contribution to a field that has long struggled
with questions of settlement and placing people and their archaeological signatures
within the landscape.
While the first three contributions, in very different ways, showcase various
different ways in which prehistorians are able to grapple with questions of land use
and landscape, the fifth chapter (Elliott), while staying in Mesolithic Britain, focuses on
a particular socio-ecological subject that has been at the heart of Mesolithic studies in
north-west Europe since the pioneering work of Grahame Clark (1936): the relationship
between people and deer. Using analogues from studies of modern-day animal ecology
and behaviour, Elliott highlights how it is possible to develop a far more nuanced
approach to human/animal relations than has typically been shown in Mesolithic
research. Chapter 6 (Borenstein) follows on from this by also exploring human-animal