Mammoth bone deposits and subsistence practices during Mid-Upper Palaeolithic in Central Europe: three cases from Moravia and Poland

Abstract

The lowlands of Lower Austria–Moravia–South Poland form an important natural corridor in Central Europe, allowing migrations of both animals and humans between the Danube valley and the North European Plain. The paper examines the relationship between mammoth bone deposits and Gravettian settlements along this corridor, basing on contextual archaeological evidence in general, and on zooarchaeological analyses of the individual sites: Dolnı́ Věstonice I–II, Milovice G, and Kraków Spadzista Street (B). Mammoth bone accumulations from these areas can be interpreted as butchery places on the death locations (as in Milovice G) and as butchery places on death/hunting site (as in Kraków Spadzista Street (B)). At these sites, Gravettian people may have seasonally gathered, taking advantage of landscape geomorphology and marshy conditions to organize collective mammoth hunts. The long-term occupations, as recorded at the Moravian sites with their exceptional archaeological evidence, support this idea. The mammoth-dominated sites probably result from specialized mammoth hunts as well as from other means of exploitation of these animals during peculiar environmental stresses, both seasonal (e.g., the palaeoecological changes during the end spring thawing period), and long-term in nature (the declining features of the mammoth population, as shown in Kraków Spadzista Street (B)).