The use of ethnographic analyses for researching Late Palaeolithic settlement systems, settlement patterns and land use in the Northwest European Plain

Abstract

In this paper the results of the analysis of data on residential and non-residential settlements in seventy arctic and sub-arctic North American collector societies are presented. These results are related to the major resource strategies of those societies, and pertain to the ten analytical domains recommended by Binford (1983) for the analysis and interpretation of collector settlements. These results can serve as an effective analogue for the diagnosis and interpretation of Late Palaeolithic Federmesser settlements and land-use practices. Ten fully excavated, representative and mutually comparable Federmesser sites are studied (Houtsma et al. in press). One of these is situated in Great Britain, the others in the Northwest European Plain. By statistical analyses of the ethnographic and the archaeological data, the functions of the ten settlements are diagnosed. Most probably none of these ten sites represents a residential settlement. The hypothesis is proposed that the Federmesser culture constitutes a single language family or perhaps a single tribe/society, with part of its residential settlements in the present North Sea.