Geoffrey A. Clark

Grave Shortcomings: The Evidence for Neandertal Burial [and Comments and Reply]

Evidence for purposeful disposal of the dead and other inferences of ritual behavior in the Middle Paleolithic are examined geoarchaeologically. Cave geomorphology, sedimentology, and taphonomy form the basis for a reexamination of the Neandertal discoveries most often cited in this connection: La Chapelle-auxSaints, Le Moustier, La Ferrassie, Teshik-Tash, Regourdou, and Shanidar. Logical incongruencies are identified between the published observations and the conclusion that Neandertals were being buried by their conspecifics.

Grave Markers: Middle and Early Upper Paleolithic Burials and the Use of Chronotypology in Contemporary Paleolithic Research

Comparison of mortuary data from the Middle and Early Upper Paleolithic archaeological record shows that, contrary to previous assessments, there is much evidence for continuity between the two periods. This suggests that if R. H. Gargetts critique of alleged Middle Paleolithic burials is to be given credence, it should also be applied to the burials of the Early Upper Paleolithic. Evidence for continuity reinforces conclusions derived from lithic and faunal analyses and site locations that the Upper Paleolithic as a reified category masks much variation in the archaeological record and is therefore not an appropriate analytical tool. Dividing the Upper Paleolithic into Early and Late phases might be helpful for understanding the cultural and biological processes at work.

Art as information: Explaining Upper Palaeolithic art in western Europe

Abstract Proceeding from the information exchange theory of style, we argue that the changing temporal and spatial distributions of mobile and parietal art in Paleolithic Europe are related aspects of a single evolutionary process: alternating selective pressures differentially favoring the expression of assertive and emblemic style over the 30–7 kyr BP interval. These pressures result from demographic and social change across the European subcontinent in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene. We develop a model of cultural selection for symbolic behavior manifest as art that proceeds from and parallels natural selection in neo‐Darwinian evolutionary theory.

Migration as an explanatory concept in paleolithic archaeology

Migration is frequently invoked as an explanation for pattern in paleolithic archaeology but the credibility of doing so depends almost exclusively upon acceptance of an analogy between historical process and the processes that have combined to create an ancient archaeological record. It is argued here that paleolithic archaeology cannot be treated as an extension of history and that historical processes are therefore inappropriate analogies for the site formation processes manifest in Upper Pleistocene archaeological contexts. The credibility accorded migration as an explanatory concept varies from one national or regional research tradition to the next. Why this should be so is examined in a discussion of the paradigm concept and how it affects construals of the nature and meaning of pattern.

Paradigms in science and archaeology

The paradigm concept as developed in western philosophy of science contexts is reviewed, and the metaphysical paradigms that govern research protocols in mainstream Old and New World prehistoric archaeology are described and compared. It is concluded that post-1970 New World archaeological research receives its intellectual mandate from anthropology, is founded on postpositivist biases, and is governed by a critical-realist ontology, a modified-objectivist epistemology, and an experimental-manipulative methodology. Post-1970 Old World archaeological research is viewed as a kind of history, remains mostly in the strict empiricist tradition, and is governed by a realist ontology, an inductivist epistemology, and by an observational methodology. The claims of various kinds of postprocessual archaeology are also evaluated in terms of the paradigm concept.

The middle‐upper paleolithic transition in Europe: An American perspective

A view of the Middle‐Upper Paleolithic transition in Europe is offered from the perspective of Americanist anthropological archaeology. After a brief consideration of how the transition seems to be perceived by many British and Continental workers, patterns in lithic typology and technology, raw material variability, reduction strategies and intensity of site use, blank frequencies; bone, antler and ivory technologies, paleolithic art, subsistence strategies and settlement patterns are reviewed. It is concluded that perceptions of pattern, and what it might mean, are (1) theory‐laden and paradigm dependent, and (2) are almost entirely determined by the relative importance of historicist biases in a particular research tradition, and (3) by preconceptions about the nature of the biological transition between archaic and modern humans.

Why not the Neandertals

Some workers have suggested that a hypothetical genetic mutation in an African population less than 100,000 years ago led to a cascade of neurological changes in the human brain that culminated in the appearance of modern language. Language then triggered the socioeconomic and cognitive changes we associate with behavioral modernity and Africans, armed with behavioral modernity, then spread out from that continent, out-competing, displacing, extirpating, outbreeding or, most generally, replacing the Neandertals and other archaic humans throughout the middle latitudes of the Old World. The Neandertals of Europe are the best-known, best-represented and longest studied test case for this theory. In this paper we present evidence from skeletal anatomy, mitochondrial DNA, morphology and genetics of speech and the archaeology of the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition in Europe that directly contradicts all of the elements in this replacement scenario. The processes leading to modernity involved the entire human species, and were based on the ethnogenic principle of communication and reticulation among populations.

Observations on Systematics in Paleolithic Archaeology

The intellectual traditions that frame Paleolithic research in Europe and the United States are reviewed, and the European Middle Paleolithic archaeological record is examined for patterns that contradict the “textbook generalizations” embodied in Paul Mellars’ “human revolution”. The fact that different typologies are used to describe the Middle and Upper Paleolithic respectively emphasizes differences between them (especially if typology “trumps” any other systematic investigation of pattern), effectively precluding the perception of continuity in retouched stone tool form over the Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition. The proliferation of “transition industries” over the past 20 years has made the picture much more complicated than it was before ca. 1990, and the identification of ca. 20 Mousterian “facies” since 1985 strongly suggests that the west Eurasian Mousterian is more complex and variable than previously thought. We conclude that there is much under-acknowledged formal convergence in the kinds and frequencies of chipped stone artifacts, that patterns in lithic industries are mostly determined by rawmaterial package size, quality and forager mobility, that changes in lithic technology are only “historical” at the macroscale (i.e., over evolutionary time), and that formal convergence likely overrides any “cultural” component supposedly present in the form of retouched stone tools.

Accidents of History: Conceptual Frameworks in Paleoarchaeology

A moment’s reflection will show that the various analytical units commonly used by paleolithic archaeologists in western Eurasia (e.g., Aurignacian, Mousterian) are ‘accidents of history,’ created for the most part by French prehistorians between c. 1880 and c. 1940 in order to solve chronological problems in the years before absolute dating methods had become available. Whether or not it makes sense to continue to use them as anything other than a vague and general lingua franca is addressed here, along with the question of what ‘transitions’ between these units might mean or imply about prehistoric human behavior. Since the units themselves are ‘accidents of history,’ the transitions between them might not mean anything at all from the behavioral ecology perspective adopted by some American and European workers. The essay compares and contrasts the conceptual frameworks of culture history (CH) and human behavioral ecology (HBE), focusing on archaeological monitors of human adaptation and how these change, or fail to change, at analytical unit boundaries.

From the Mousterian to the Metal Ages

This chapter is a regional study of long-term change in the human diet. Three major topics are addressed. First, biases about what 1 believe causes change in human subsistence are made explicit, and the components of a model for examining subsistence change are identified. Next, general patterns in north Spanish archaeological faunas are reviewed and then analyzed in terms of the model. A comparison is made between theoretical values generated by the model and those observed for eight culture/stratigraphic units ordered in time. An effort is made to explain an anomaly (the Cantabrian Lower Magdalenian) detected by application of the approach. Finally, the model itself is assessed in terms of its adequacy for dealing with economic faunas from ancient (Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene) archaeological contexts.