Mi Pope

Boxgrove, West Sussex : Rescue excavations of a lower Palaeolithic landsurface (Boxgrove project B, 1989-91)

In 1988 an area of 12,000 m 2 in Quarry 2 at Boxgrove, West Sussex, was identified as being under threat front gravel and sand extraction. It was decided to sample the threatened area in 1989 with a series of 6 m 2 test pits. The results of this survey identified two areas that merited further investigation, and area excavations were carried out at Quarry 2/C and Quarry 2/D in 1990 and 1991 respectively. These concentrated on the main Pleistocene landsurface (Unit 4c) and revealed spreads of knapping debris associated with the production of flint handaxes. Two test pits and area Q2/C produced handaxes, over 90% of which had tranchet sharpening at the distal end. A small amount of core reduction and only a few flake tools were found: these were all from Quarry 2/C. Faunal remains were located in the northern part of the excavations where Unit 4c had a calcareous cover. In Quarry 2/C the bones of C. elaphus and Bison sp. exhibited traces of human modification. The project employed two methods of artefact retrieval: direct excavation in metre squares and bulk sieving of units within them. Comparison of the results from these methods suggests that, when on-site time is limited, the integration of these methods is a valid technique in both qualitative and quantitative terms for data recovery. The excavated areas are interpreted as a tool-sharpening and butchery site that may have been a fixed and known locale in the landscape (Q2/C), and a location on the periphery of an area of intensive knapping reduction (Q2/D). Sedimentological and microfaunal analyses demonstrate that Unit 4c was formed as a soil in the top of a marine-lagoonal silt, the pedogenic processes being similar to those observed after draining Dutch polder lakes. The palaeoenvironment is interpreted as an area of open grassland with some shrub and bush vegetation. In places the surface of the soil supported small ephemeral pools and flashes. This area of grassland is seen as a corridor for herds of ungulates moving east and west between the sea to the south and the relict cliff and wooded downland block to the north. Within this corridor these herds were preyed upon by various carnivores, and hominids. The temperate sediments at Boxgrove were deposited in the later part of the Cromerian Complex and immediately pre-date the Anglian Cold Stage; they are therefore around 500,000 years old. The archaeological material from these and overlying cold stage deposits is broadly contemporary with that at High Lodge, Suffolk and Waverley Wood, Warwickshire.

A new view from La Cotte de St Brelade, Jersey

Did Neanderthal hunters drive mammoth herds over cliffs in mass kills? Excavations at La Cotte de St Brelade in the 1960s and 1970s uncovered heaps of mammoth bones, interpreted as evidence of intentional hunting drives. New study of this Middle Palaeolithic coastal site, however, indicates a very different landscape to the featureless coastal plain that was previously envisaged. Reconsideration of the bone heaps themselves further undermines the ‘mass kill’ hypothesis, suggesting that these were simply the final accumulations of bone at the site, undisturbed and preserved in situ when the return to a cold climate blanketed them in wind-blown loess.

The Valdoe: Archaeology of a Locality within the Boxgrove Palaeolandscape, West Sussex

A programme of archaeological assessment, funded through the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund, was undertaken at the Valdoe Quarry in West Sussex ahead of a renewed and final stage of gravel extraction at the site. This paper gives an account of the evidence for human activity recovered in the course of this work. The analysis demonstrates that the Valdoe Quarry contained archaeology relating to the transport and modification of bifaces. These signatures formed part of wider patterns of land-use operated by the same hominin groups found at Boxgrove, within a single, developing palaeolandscape. It is concluded that further activity sites remain to be discovered within the general environs of the Valdoe and the parish of East Lavant where historically there have been surface finds of bifaces.

Settlement, society and cognition in human evolution : landscapes in mind

This volume provides a landscape narrative of early hominin evolution, linking conventional material and geographic aspects of the early archaeological record with wider and more elusive social, cognitive and symbolic landscapes. It seeks to move beyond a limiting notion of early hominin culture and behaviour as dictated solely by the environment to present the early hominin world as the outcome of a dynamic dialogue between the physical environment and its perception and habitation by active agents. This international group of contributors presents theoretically informed yet empirically based perspectives on hominin and human landscapes. Includes 17 contributions by both well-known and up-and-coming scholars of the Palaeolithic and human evolution Recognises, celebrates and builds on the contributions made by Clive Gamble to the study of the Palaeolithic Challenges common assumption that early hominin culture and behaviour was dictated solely by the environment, thus restoring the role of agency in the discussion of early hominin evolution

Morpho-Metric Variability of Early Gravettian Tanged “Font-Robert” Points, and Functional Implications

Early Gravettian Font-Robert points – tanged tools created on blades – were initially defined as weapon armatures, and this is frequently referred to as their function. However, Font-Robert points have been described as a morphologically variable type, with suggestions that this morphological variability represents a functional variability. Here we discuss this issue with reference to a sample of Early Gravettian tanged artifacts (including Font-Robert points) from Maisieres-Canal in Belgium, as well as two similar artifacts from Britain. Although many of the artifacts studied have a morphology and size commensurate with their function as lithic armatures, the majority are apparently unlikely to have functioned within a “complex” projectile technology, which contrasts with measurement data published on Font-Robert points from France. Instead, Font-Robert points from Maisieres-Canal and Britain display a notable level of morpho-metric variability. By extension, this suggests a functional variability, a possibility that needs confirmation with use-wear analysis. These Font-Robert points may have served as technologically simpler throwing or thrusting spears, as knives, or as versatile, multi-function tools. Overall, we stress that morpho-metric data complements use-wear studies, when assessing potential projectile function, and can help make an assessment of which artifacts to target for such research techniques.

The archaeology of persistent places: The Palaeolithic case of la Cotte de St Brelade, Jersey

Abstract Excavations at the Middle Pleistocene site of La Cotte de St Brelade, on the island of Jersey in the English Channel, have revealed a long sequence of occupation. The continued use of the site by Neanderthals throughout an extended period of changing climate and environment reveals how, despite changes in the types of behaviour recorded at the site, La Cotte emerged as a persistent place in the memory and landscape of its early hominin inhabitants. The sites status as a persistent place for these people suggests a level of social and cognitive development permitting reference to and knowledge of places distant in time and space as long ago as at least MIS 7.

Engineering the Anthropocene: Scalable social networks and resilience building in human evolutionary timescales:

The Anthropocene represents the emergence of human societies as a ‘great force of nature’. To understand and engage productively with this emergent global force, it is necessary to understand its origins, dynamics and structuring processes as the long-term evolutionary product of human niche construction, based on three key human characteristics: tool making, habitat construction and most importantly: social network engineering. The exceptional social capacities of behaviourally modern humans, constituting human ultrasociality, are expressed through the formation of increasingly complex and extensive social networks, enabling flexible and diverse group organisation, sociocultural niche construction, engineered adaptation and resilience building. The human drive towards optimising communication infrastructures and expanding social networks is the key human adaptation underpinning the emergence of the Anthropocene. Understanding the deep roots of human ultrasocial behaviour is essential to guiding contemporary societies towards more sustainable human–environment interactions in the Anthropocene present and future. We propose that socially networked engineered solutions will continue to be the prime driver of human resilience and adaptive capacity in the face of global environmental risks and societal challenges such as climate change, sea-level rise, localised extreme weather events and ecosystem degradation.

Crossing the human threshold: Dynamic transformations and persistent places during the Middle Pleistocene

T is the first volume in a new series edited by Clive Gamble, Emeritus Professor in the Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins, University of Southampton. The series will explore deep human history, setting up frameworks for ideas and controversies in interpretation of the archaeological record. The present book examines the Middle Pleistocene from 130,000–800,000 years ago from a global perspective. Using the archaeological record with a landscape approach, the authors conclude that humanity emerges (or crosses the human threshold) slowly and independently in a number of Old World localities. Furthermore, the authors conclude that this human emergence was not confined to a single hominin lineage, but a number of lineages in different areas of the Old World. Papers in this book were first presented during an April 2016 workshop at the Jersey Museum, St Helier, UK. The workshop was the outcome of a three year project devoted to re-examining the archaeological data from the cave site of La Cotte de St. Brelade. Some of the authors, as Cambridge undergraduates, had excavated at La Cotte under the direction of Professor Charles McBurney during the 1960s and 1970s, and they were delighted to examine renewed fieldwork in Jersey. In conjunction with the workshop, an international exhibition—Jersey: Ice Age Island— was mounted by museum curators from Jersey Heritage. The focus of the book is changes in landscape use and innovation in hunting strategies, tool use, and the control of fire in cave sites in the Levant, South Africa, Europe, and Asia. Some open air sites in northern France and England also demonstrate human persistence in the use of certain landscapes. Chapters are arranged in three sections. The first section presents a theoretical framework for interpretation; the second section concentrates on sites in western Europe and the Levant; and the third section expands the discussion into Africa and Eurasia. Gamble makes the case that the Middle Pleistocene exhibits thresholds in human advances that are equivalent to those revealed in the Upper Pleistocene. These thresholds involved innovations in landscape use and stone tools. However, no single cause (e.g., language, cooking) generated these thresholds, and the threshold crossings were gradual and not rapid. Gamble argues that persistent places emerge for the first time during the Middle Pleistocene, and they figure in the organization of the hominin niche. A persistent place is defined as an area that is occupied through at least one glacial-interglacial period, demonstrating that humans can successfully occupy the area in spite of great climatic disruption. The occupation does not need to be continual, but it does need to be repetitive. These persistent places become part of a settlement landscape, where important resources are located. For the first time in hominin evolution, social interaction, revolving around these places, does not require face-to-face proximity, as is the case for non-human primates. Sociality can take place outside the limits of individual vision and hearing. The editors realized the importance of persistent places when reanalyzing the archaeological data from La Cotte de St. Brelade. Similar rich data are available from cave sites in the Middle Pleistocene in the Levant, western Europe, South Africa, and China, but rich open air sites also exist. The previous generation of researchers used terms like “home base” and “site catchment,” but users of the persistent places and landscape model are aware of taphonomic biases unrecognized by earlier researchers. Pope examines how the routine occupation of cave locales (including rock shelters and fissures) structured human behavior. Single cave sites also contain deeper and well-dated records (including important cultural sequences) than open air sites. The appearance of persistent cave sites is a threshold in hominin behavior, and illustrates active niche construction by hominins. Pope also attempts to model the lag-time between when a behavioral threshold is crossed and its appearance in the archaeological record. Kuhn et al. amplify the notion of niche construction at Levantine cave sites, using the appearance of domesticity and homes in the Middle Pleistocene to argue for a uniquely hominin-like type of land use, or, at least, such sites are incubators of behaviors that appear at campsites made by later hunter-gatherers. Barkai et al. focus specifically on the record of Qesem Cave in Israel—a “land of flint and fallow deer.” They contend that the site, which, so far, records 200,000 years of occupation, was carefully selected, because of hunting opportunities for prime age fallow deer and flint resources. Bone was used to re-touch stone tools, and hominin activities were spatially organized around a central hearth. Stiner presents the clearest explication of how hearth and home-making in the Middle Pleistocene Levant contribute to the origins of family life. Prey choice, carcass transport, carcass butchering, and control of fire demonstrate the emergence of hearth-centered sites where people permanently resided. These sites therefore are the genera-

What use is the Palaeolithic in promoting new prehistoric narratives

Imagine a situation in which the world and the universe are as old as we know them to be, but in which people came into being in 4004 BC. Let us think for a minute about what implications such a scenario would have for our notions of the historical process. However people came to be (and we might have to invoke some form of divine intervention for such a sudden appearance), it is likely that people would be disengaged from the physical and causal processes of the rest of the universe. With our biological ties severed and the work of Darwin undone for the human realm, culture and human exceptionalism would inevitably loom large. Humans could not be seen as emerging through an evolutionary process in tandem with other organisms, nor would we be linked to the broader history of the universe through the operation of physical or chemical processes as normally understood. The radical discontinuity between people and everything else would require a special explanatory framework for humans. This might in turn lead to a division of knowledge, in some parts of the world at least, between those who study the social, cultural, philosophical, anthropological and historical aspects of people and those interested in the physical and biological worlds. No reputable humanities scholar or social scientist believes that people are 6004 years old. But many act as if this were the case, so that the last few thousand years are when people became interestingly human, started farming for a living, dwelling in cities and commenced mass production and consumption. The rest is history: mass-consuming urbanites demonstrating culture at a level not glimpsed in any other species, the origins of which lie in a control of natural resources from which we are set apart. It is as if the Palaeolithic never happened.