Blowing the Whistle Again

Abstract

First of all, I would like to thank F. Audouze, C. Gamble and T. Murray for their written reactions to my article. I see their commentaries as both interesting and informative and the remarks put forward by them as being relevant to regional upper palaeolithic research in general. The value of their comments is not, in my opinion, limited only to researchers of the northern Magdalenian. With this in mind, I hope that the current discussion is seen as a positive development also by palaeolithic archaeologists working in other areas using other databases. Although each of the commentaries vary greatly in content, they all share an important common theme: the value of ethnographic generalizations remains uncertain even for the later phases of the Palaeolithic. That I subscribe to this point of view should surprise nobody who has read my article. It is important that we, in Gamble's words, ‘become our own ethnographers of the Magdalenian’, without doing damage to the heuristic value of models such as those postulated by Binford.