Residential Mobility Strategies Research Articles

Human response to habitat suitability during the Last Glacial Maximum in Western Europe

ABSTRACTThis research takes a multi‐dimensional approach to the study of the archaeological record of Western Europe during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), combining two distinct components of the human adaptive system (technological organization and mobility) to test the impact of environmental variability on the mobility of Upper Palaeolithic groups. To this end we make use of two models. The first predicts landscape suitability as a function of a suite of environmental variables including topography, climate and inter‐annual climate variability. The second model explores the link between patterns of mobility and technological organization, using lithic retouch frequencies as a proxy for mobility strategies. Combining detailed environmental and lithic data allows us to derive a clearer picture of human adaptation to environmental conditions during a particularly rigorous climatic interval in Western Europe. Our results show that while foragers generally favoured more suitable habitats, logistical mobility strategies were deployed across a wide spectrum of habitat suitability. Residential mobility strategies, on the other hand, tend to occur in relatively less suitable and thus inherently more variable habitats. We conclude that foragers made use of a predominantly logistic strategy during the LGM while adopting more residential strategies in response to local and relatively short‐term fluctuations in the environment. The approach adopted here offers several promising avenues for future research on the ecology of human groups during the LGM.

The formation of lithic assemblages

Research into the processes that form the archaeological record is an important component of archaeological practice because formation processes are a key link between the materials that archaeologists study and prehistoric societies that they seek to understand. Computational modeling is a comparatively new technology with potential to provide new insights into the dynamics of human societies, but which has been minimally applied so far in the study of archaeological formation processes. We use computational modeling as an experimental environment to examine processes that form the archaeological record of lithic assemblages. This is especially important for lithics because it is a largely extinct technology and we cannot directly observe the accumulation of lithic assemblages over time frames comparable to those represented in the archaeological record. We systematically evaluate the individual and combined effects of the length of stay at sites, raw material distribution, differences in activities performed with lithics, and movement patterns on lithic assemblages that accumulate over different time intervals. Not surprisingly, increased access to raw material decreases the frequency of retouched artifacts in assemblages, while tasks that require more lithic use produce assemblages with higher retouch frequencies. While length of stay affects the density of lithic accumulations at sites, it has little effect on assemblages composition. Mobility patterns alone have limited impact on assemblage composition. However, mobility coupled with place provisioning or individual provisioning, associated with logistical and residential mobility strategies respectively, have significant impacts on assemblage composition consistent with prior empirical studies. Counterintuitively, the artifact palimpsests of multiple occupations that characterize most archaeological deposits may provide better information about human ecology and changing adaptations than assemblages that represent snapshots of a single or a few occupations. This work provides valuable new, quantitative insights into the information about past human social, ecological, and technological practices embedded in lithic assemblages.

The Shift to a Predominantly Logistical Mobility Strategy can Inhibit Rather than Enhance Forager Interaction

Barton et al. (2011) claim that western Eurasia witnessed a shift in hominin land-use from a predominantly residential mobility strategy to a predominantly logistical mobility strategy during the Late Pleistocene, and that this shift would have led to increased interaction rates between Neandertals and modern humans. But an important assumption of their model—that foragers employing a predominantly logistical mobility strategy cover a greater geographic extent over the course of their lifetimes than foragers employing a predominantly residential mobility strategy—may not be universally true. Here, I reevaluate Barton et al.’s conclusion with a simple foraging-radius model. My results show that a shift to a predominantly logistical mobility strategy can inhibit rather than enhance forager interaction under conditions that presume less of Pleistocene hominin foragers.

Land, water and symbolic aspects of the Mesolithic in southern Scandinavia

This paper presents a preliminary model of the occupational history of the valley bottoms at the edges of the bed of the Quequen Grande River (Argentina) during the late Holocene. The ultimate goal of the research is to situate some aspects of technology, mobility, land-use patterns and settlement systems as a proximal consequence of a long-term process of 'lithification', that is, the positioning of lithic raw material across otherwise lithic-free areas of the landscape. In order to address this issue, distributions of lithic artefacts are used to discuss features of the regional technological organisation and settlement systems and the relationships between people and the landscape. In that sense, lithification, a variant of a 'provisioning places' strategy, has implications for other aspects of a human adaptive system. The lithification process has influenced the organisation of technology, in particular the degree of planning and anticipation necessary, which in turn affects the degree to which technological strategies (eg, curation and expediency) were employed. Lithification also has implications for the organisation of logistical and residential mobility strategies by encouraging reoccupations, changing periodicity of reoccupation, altering landscape use patterns, and making for longer seasonal or task-specific stays. One end result is an artificial conflation of resources, and a lessening of resource heterogeneity. For example, there will be more places where critical resources, such as water, fauna, and flora, co-occur with the lithic resources needed to exploit them. The lithic raw material distribution is only partially dependant on natural occurrence because the environment has been reorganised and (intentionally or otherwise) built by human activity. We propose that in the Pampas the late Holocene witnesses a process of 'building a landscape' which had implications for social organisation and hence played an important role in regional human adaptation and cultural evolution. (Less)

Determining Sheep Birth Seasonality by Analysis of Tooth Enamel Oxygen Isotope Ratios: The Late Stone Age Site of Kasteelberg (South Africa)

Timing of birth of domestic animals is regulated by environmental and genetic variables, and can also be manipulated by the herder. For this reason it is difficult to predict birth distribution in a prehistoric context. Birth seasonality of prehistoric sheep from the site of Kasteelberg, South Africa, was investigated by high resolution intra-tooth analysis of enamel oxygen isotope ratios. The results show two birth seasons, probably in autumn and spring. This may reflect females lambing more than once a year, or subdivision of the flock into groups where births were scheduled at different times of the year. This result has important implications for food availability throughout the year, the role of sheep in the subsistence economy, residential mobility strategy of the human community and use of sheep mortality profiles for interpretation of season of occupation of archaeological sites.

Middle Archaic Bone Pins: Evidence of Mid-Holocene Regional-Scale Social Groups in the Southern Midwest

Carved and engraved bone pins collected from eight sites along the Middle Mississippi and Lower Ohio Rivers and their tributaries are used to investigate the development of regional-scale social interaction among increasingly more sedentary late Middle Archaic (6000–5000 B.P.) hunter-gatherer groups. The similarity in pin morphology and decoration suggests an increasing level of social integration among groups that were shifting from a residential mobility strategy to a logistically organized one. The development or amplification of intergroup social networks provided access to information and resources that were formerly obtained through more direct forms of intergroup contact. The spatial distribution of selected bone pin styles suggests that these social networks extended over a considerable portion of the southern Midwest. Collectively, these data suggest that regional social networks existed in this part of the Midwest much earlier than previously believed.