Table Of Content

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 1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083 © Oxbow Books and the individual contributors 2019 Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-946-3 Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-947-0 (ePub) A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2019949795 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher in writing. Typeset in India for Casemate Publishing Services. www.casematepublishingservices.com For a complete list of Oxbow titles, please contact: UNITED KINGDOM UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Oxbow Books Oxbow Books Telephone (01865) 241249 Telephone (610) 853-9131, Fax (610) 853-9146 Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected] www.oxbowbooks.com www.casemateacademic.com/oxbow Oxbow Books is part of the Casemate Group 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