RETHINKING THE CULTURAL TAXONOMY OF THE EUROPEAN FINAL PALAEOLITHIC IN LIGHT OF PARADIGMATIC BIASES
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 06/10/2020

For the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic of Eurasia (Clark, 2009), the Epipalaeolithic of the Levant (Neeley and Barton, 1994) and the Final Palaeolithic of northern Asia (Vasil’ev, 2001), it has been remarked that deeply-ingrained paradigmatic differences between European and North American ways of approaching in particular the lithic evidence has critical bearings on our fundamental understanding of these periods. In traditional European approaches, there are many, often regional, cultural taxonomic units – technocomplexes, cultures, industries, groups, facies – and these are thought to reflect prehistoric ‘ethnogeographic’ variability. We here bring novel 2D geometric morphometric methods to bear on a large sample of Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic formal projectile point types in order to assess whether this variability can be captured quantitatively and across regions and research traditions. Combining this approach with a research-historical review of the origins of these regional taxonomic units, we ask, to what degree many of these merely are “phantom cultures” (Barton and Neeley, 1996: 139).

Author(s): Hoggard, Christian - Sauer, Florian - Riede, Felix (Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University)

References:
Barton, C.M. and Neeley, M.P., 1996. Phantom cultures of the Levantine Epipaleolithic. Antiquity 70 (267), 139-147.
Clark, G.A., 2009. Accidents of History: Conceptual Frameworks in Paleoarchaeology. In: M. Camps and P. Chauhan (Eds.), Sourcebook
of Paleolithic Transitions: Methods, Theories, and Interpretations, pp. 19-41. Springer New York, New York, NY.
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Vasil’ev, S.A., 2001. The Final Palaeolithic in northern Asia: Lithic assembalge diversity and explanatory models. Arctic Anthropology
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