The
Lagar Velho child and the Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition in Iberia
Joao Zilhao, Instituto Português
de Arqueologia, Av. da Índia 136, P-1300-300 Lisboa, Portugal. jzilhao@ipa.min-cultura.pt
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The ca. 25,000-year-old Lagar Velho LV1 child burial was found in December 1998. Excavation of the site throughout 2000-2001 suggests that no evidence of human occupation prior to the burial exists in the underlying deposits. Some 15 meters eastwards, a level with human occupation debris (artefacts, burnt bone and charcoal) was identified in the same stratigraphic position but horizontally separated from the burial by extensive archaeologically sterile deposits. This level, whose radiocarbon dating is in process, may correspond to a penecontemporaneous habitat, but no prior human use of the site is recorded in this part of the shelter either.
The burial lay only a few centimetres
below current ground surface and was for the most part protected under an overhang of the
rock, which saved it from total destruction when the site was terraced in 1992. The skull
was missing because it originally lay slightly higher than the rest of the body and was
shattered by the bulldozer. Its fragments were scattered eastwards along the back wall of
the shelter. Systematic recovery enabled its partial physical reconstruction as well as a
complete virtual computer reconstruction.
The burial ritual was very similar to
that documented in contemporaneous funerary contexts of central and Eastern Europe. The
body was laid down in extended position, slightly tilted towards the back wall of the
shelter, left foot on top of the right one. Prior to the deposition of the body, a single
branch of Scots pine was burned inside the shallow pit excavated for the grave. The red
staining of the burial context is related to the use of ochre in the burial ritual: the
body must have been wrapped in a shroud of ochre-painted skin, whose subsequent decay
caused the transfer of the mineral pigment to the skeleton and surrounding sediment.
A Littorina obtusata shell
pendant was recovered in the child’s neck. Four pierced red deer canines were
recovered 3 meters east of the burial, in a cluster of displaced, small, red-stained
fragments of the child’s skull. The association of these deer canines with the
cranial vault, as in contemporaneous burials from Italy and Moravia, suggests that they
must have been part of a headdress. Other burial offerings include an ensemble of rabbit
bones between the child’s legs, as well as several red deer bones clustered around
the child’s right shoulder and feet.
The child’s age at death is
estimated to lie between 4.5 and 5.0 years and there are no indications of pathological
conditions that might have affected normal skeletal development. Therefore, the unique
combination of derived modern human traits, such as the characteristic prominent chin,
with genetically-inherited Neanderthal traits, such as the crural proportions and
tibio-femoral robusticity, must be considered philogenetically significant: it suggests
that the last Neanderthal groups living in Iberia ca. 28,000 years ago contributed to the
gene pool of subsequent early Upper Palaeolithic populations of the Peninsula.
Given that
Lagar Velho does not seem to have been used by humans before 25,000 BP, substantial
information on the crucial preceding periods of Iberian late Neanderthal isolated
development south of the Ebro frontier followed by the postulated interaction needs to be
sought elsewhere. The Middle Palaeolithic sequence under excavation in the Gruta da
Oliveira (Almonda karstic system) since 1989 provides information on the period between
45,000 and 30,000 BP. Although artefacts from the uppermost levels of the sequence,
between 40,000 and 30,000 BP, are typically Middle Palaeolithic, evidence from underlying
levels dated to >43,000 BP suggests that experimentation with Upper Palaeolithic-type
technologies was under way at about the same time it started eastwards in Europe, where it
eventually gave rise to the Châtelperronian and related pre-Aurignacian Upper
Palaeolithic cultures. If this is confirmed by future research, it would represent further
evidence that technological change in the Upper Pleistocene was non-directional and that
adaptive/ecological reasons may explain the pattern of isolation and survival until the
onset of OIS2 of Iberian Middle Palaeolithic Neanderthals.
R.N.E. Barton, Department of
Anthropology, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, United Kingdom
F. Giles
Pacheco, Museo Municipal El Puerto Santa María, Cádiz, España.
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The last interglacial (Riss-Wurm),
OIS 5e, around 125 ka was one of the mildest stages of the Quaternary, marking the start
of the most recent phase of the Pleistocene. In cultural terms it marked the transition
from Final Acheulian to Middle Palaeolithic. In the geographic framework of the south-west
of the Iberian Peninsula the archaeological records attributed to the end of the Middle
Pleistocene and beginning of the Early Upper Pleistocene reflect a
change in the modes of population dispersion and a technological change linked to the
diversification of resources.
The Middle Palaeolithic or Mode 3
represents an evolutionary phase within the technological development of the human groups, mainly characterised by the
generalized exploitation of nuclei geared to the morphological pre-determination of the
pieces (Levallois technology). Even though the simultaneous provisioning of diverse raw
materials, the choice of flint which dominates the lithic assemblages, stands out. Large
tools, Direct Technical Operative Themes (bifaces and tihedrals) transfer their potential
to other positive base morphologies. The systematisation of napping techniques produces as
a result highly standardised productions, en the category BN2G there is a predominance of
scrapers and denticulates among others. Unretouched pieces are also important. The
technological development could be linked to the greater specialization of the tools, of
their functions, related with a change of hunting strategies which become more
specialized.
In the south of the Iberian Peninsula, from the river terrace sequences of the Guadalquivir (T-13-14), Guadalete (T-6) and Tinto-Odiel an indeterminate Middle Palaeolithic has been found, with post-Acheulian aspect and differing from the “Classical Mousterian” which is more linked to cave occupation in mountain areas. The differentiation of operative chains according to the type of occupation would follow from different strategies of resource exploitation, reflecting a better knowledge and control of resources that each environment offered. Nevertheless technological indicators predominate, the production of positive bases from discoidal negative bases.
The greater variability in the
patterns of settlement in the Middle Palaeolithic signals the relevance of natural
communication routes in the search for distinct ways of utilizing each area and harvesting
resources. Deposits reflect alternating wet
and warm periods in an open and diverse fluvial landscape, with a system of ecological
mosaics focused on rivers and seasonal lakes associated with open Mediterranean forest
between lowland hills and piedmont.
Currently the arrival of modern humans to Europe and the extinction of the Neanderthals continues to be one of the most exciting debates in the field of prehistory research. Very close to our region there are key sites for the development of models that can resolve the enigma. We are referring to the research that is being carried out in the Gibraltar caves, especially the data provided by the excavation of Gorham’s Cave.
Based on the dates, principally C14,
obtained from Gorham’s Cave we can
propose a chronological framework for these events. In this cave, the first level with an
Upper Palaeolithic industry is around uncal 30 kyr. This is probably several thousand
years after the most recent Neanderthal occupation level, which has AMS dates of around 32
kyr. At least in the southern Iberian Peninsula the modern humans seem to have arrived
after the extinction of the Neanderthals. If this is so the two events must be seen as
independent of each other.
A traditional interpretative vision,
of French tradition, subdivides the Upper Palaeolithic into a series of technological
assemblages which evolve in linear fashion in the classic sequence: Aurignacian,
Gravettian, Solutrean and Magdalenian. The sequence in the south of the Iberian Peninsula
at the end of the Upper Pleistocene is very original because of the persistence of the
Neanderthals with Mode 3 technology. This means that the earliest Upper Palaeolithic
industries of the south are advanced, without the existence of any of the transitional
industries (e.g. Chatelperronian) that are found elsewhere in Europe. We have to bear in
mind that, even accepting the detailed and well-dated archaeological sequence at
Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar, the oldest presence of modern humans in the south of the
peninsula continues to be poorly understood due to the scarcity of well contrasted data.
Recent papers have pointed to the
highly variable nature of late Middle Palaeolithic assemblages. This can be observed not
only in Central Northern Europe but also further south in the Mediterranean region, for
example, in the Italian peninsula. Such diversity has been used to argue for the
contemporary presence of different human groups (either inter-Neanderthal or Neanderthals
and Anatomically Modern Humans) and has important consequences for understanding the
Middle-Upper Palaeolithic transition. The second part of the paper presents some
preliminary results of our work in Gibraltar and Southern Spain. We emphasise the
importance of using long chronostratigraphic sequences for recognising and establishing
long-term trends. We note the presence of blade-like flakes in one of the lower
levels so far examined in Gorham's Cave (>51 ka BP uncal.) but otherwise do not
identify any great changes in technological indicators. Our data show a predominance in
the use of the discoidal core technique throughout a thick succession of Middle
Palaeolithic deposits (51-32 ka BP uncal.) until the sudden appearance of an Upper
Palaeolithic blade core technology near the top of the sequence. In the adjacent
site of Vanguard Cave there is little variability at all in the Middle Palaeolithic from
93 - 46 ka BP. On present evidence we would therefore see continuity and a late
persistence of the Middle Palaeolithic, with no obvious signs of external influence.
This implies that Neanderthals survived in isolation until their extinction with no
evidence of contact with outside competitors.
Defining modernity, establishing
rubicons, imagining the other – and the Neanderthal enigma
Olga Soffer, Department of
Anthropology, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 6l801, USA
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This paper uses insights from both
evolutionary as well as social theories to argue, first, that the reality of the
"Neanderthal enigma" is a product of historically contextualized and thus both arbitrary and diverse
classification. Our present day questions
about what did or did not happen to Neanderthals and Middle Paleolithic lifeways in
Eurasia some 50 - 30,000 years ago have a mosaic heritage that includes 19th century
unilineal evolutionary constructs that conjoined biological insights about how change
through time came about with those of social philosophers. These two roots differed
significantly in how change was envisioned and the progressive directionality of social
philosophy, while broadly congruent with Lamarckian thought, created an ongoing tension
with the innate opportunism of Darwinian biology.
For most of the 19th
century human prehistory was bilogized and
delimited as a series of progressive stages, each featuring
specific social organization, subsistence practices, and technologies. By
the end of that century the depth of human antiquity was recognized, the archaeological
record augmented by hominid fossil remains, and the
Paleolithic sub-divided within the Age of Stone, The
social-political realities of the first half of the 20th century led to a divergence in
what Euro-American scholars focused on in Paleolithic research - with those in the West
emphasizing changes in technology, and those in the East emphasizing changes in social
relationships. These two vantage points
necessarily led to different ways of segmenting the continuous Paleolithic record - into
the Lower, Middle, and Upper in the first case and into the non-kin based pre-clan and kin-based clan societies in the second. While political realities in the East
precluded archaeologists from problematizing the nature of the canonical social stages,
their Western counterparts, whose roots lay in geology and the inanimate world of fixed
categories of phenomena, refined
chronostratigraphies and systematized
purportedly diagnostic typologies. Although
different criteria were used to characterize the Middle and the Upper Paleolithic
archaeological inventories, both constructs worked exclusively with one component of past
technologies - durable tools and implements - both treated technology as sui generis, and assumed a progressive relationship
between the two.
By the later half of the 20th century, the
Paleolithic "when" and "what" having been established,
research focus shifted to the "why" - giving rise to questions about hominid behavior in the past, These questions were informed by ecological
insights albeit still carried with them many old and problematic assumptions. The limited
technological repertoire recovered from the sites was taken as a mirror of not only past
performance but also of past capacity, the parochial and arbitrary nature of
techno-typological constructs naturalized and globalized, while technological progress
continued to be seen as a self generating product of hominid genius and need rather than
as a product of their want. This accompanied
a normative stereotypical approach to behavior, one conceptualized on group level.
This complex theoretical heritage has produced the highly problematic contested
criteria used today to investigate the
Neanderthal enigma and to characterize the transition from the Middle to the Upper
Paleolithic. The central operating concept is
"modernity" - biological and behavioral - yet no agreement is at hand about its
definition. For archaeology the
"modernity" kitchen list is techno-centered
and includes blades vs flakes; ivory, bone and antler technologies vs. just
lithic or lithic plus wood ones; personal
adornments vs. the unembellished body, and
"art" and "decoration" vs. utilitarian minimalism. These criteria are more than slippery
because they are neither universal nor eternal. For
example, blades struck from prismatic or near prismatic cores appear and disappear through
time and space, as do leptolithics. Bone and
antler tools are a northern phenomenon which are not only sparse or absent outside of
Upper Paleolithic Eurasia but also surface during the Middle Paleolithic. Durable personal adornments are equally local in
time and across space as are painted cave walls and carved figurines - all but
disappearing, for example, even from Europe
at the close of the Pleistocene. This
mosaic record clearly suggests that neither "the climate" nor unique capacities
are adequate explanations for the Upper Paleolithic record.
Instead, by default and through social theories, it points us to consider
the diversity of lived lives and the daily negotiation of different interests as fruitful
arenas for study.
Using
the Eurasian paleoanthropological record set against the environmental
proscenium , I illustrate how a focus on agentic actions - one that recognizes different interests and motivations for different
groups of Middle Paleolithic people - provides new understanding about how Middle
Paleolithic lifeways may have differed from
those that succeeded them In doing so, I
argue that the constraints imposed by biological realities in certain environmental
contexts were dealt with one way during the Middle Paleolithic and another during the
Upper Paleolithic. While the basic biological
constraints were constant, the environments - both natural and social - differed in time
and space. These differences were necessarily
local in scope and need to be dealt with as
such. In sum, it is not only Neolithic or Bronze Age "man" that made
"himself", but so did "his" Middle and Upper Paleolithic predecessors
- creating both their cultures and biologies through day to day decisions and their intended and unintended consequences.