Hominid Individual in Context: Archaeological Investigations of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic landscapes, locales and artefacts

Hominid Individual in Context: Archaeological Investigations of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic landscapes, locales and artefacts

Clive Gamble

Language: English

Pages: 347

ISBN: 2:00071076

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


This book explores new approaches to the remarkably detailed information that archaeologists now have for the study of our early ancestors. Rather than explaining the archaeology of stones and bones as the product of group decisions, the contributors investigate how individual action created social life. This challenge to the accepted standpoint of the Palaeolithic brings new models and theories into the period; innovations that are matched by the resolution of data preserving individual action among the stones and bones. The volume brings together examples from recent excavations such as Boxgrove, Schöningen and Blombos Cave and the analyses of artefacts from Middle and Early Upper Pleistocene excavations in Europe, Africa and Asia.

A Mantis Carol

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Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

regular cut marks 7.6 Objects 2, 3 and 4: bone fragments with intentional cut marks 8.1 Composite schematic stratigraphical sequence through the Schöningen deposits 24 39 40 42 47 54 56 61 66 67 82 83 86 87 88 89 93 101 103 107 108 111 112 117 viii Figures 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8 9.9 10.1 10.2 10.3 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 12.6 12.7 13.1 Course of the six Pleistocene/Holocene channels at Schöningen The site of Schöningen 13

antinomy between ‘society’ and the ‘individual’. The paradox of Transformations in dividuality 33 this dualism is that the term society implies a collective but is conceptually distinct from the relations that bring them together (Strathern 1988). This Western understanding of social ‘systems’ is historically derived from the European Enlightenment, which produced a very particular understanding of personhood that is largely located around the concept of the individual (Thomas 2002). In this

0 0 296 H Level Long sharpening flakes (flint) Transverse sharpening flakes (flint) Burin spalls (flint) Relative % of burins Total – Quartz burins/ total tools 32-Flint Typical burin 33-Flint Atypical burin Relative % of burins Total – Flint tools Type 0 0 5 /53 9.4 4 3 1.1 650 E 6 0 2 /96 2.1 6 3 1.2 757 D Table 3.5 La Cotte de St Brelade: numbers of burins, bifaces and resharpening flakes 11 0 330 250 63 17 3 /28 10.7 9 4 1.4 948 C 5 0 4 /45 8.9 10 4 2.2 639 B 98 6

contextually tied. Small bifaces are discarded at different locations to larger more classic forms, and a clear dichotomy between biface-rich and biface-poor sites is so marked that it suggests to some (Leakey 1971) either overlapping between species or competing technological traditions. Structured biface discard by individuals, which we would argue had a strong role in the formation of all biface-rich sites, is therefore a fundamental and defining part of the hominin land use patterns which gave

camps (Maintenance) 0.3 0.34 0.34 0.21 Source: After Binford 1978: Tables 5.21 and 7.27. Note The similarities reflect the importance of short-season migration hunting at these two times of the year. Dismemberment therefore increases as time passes. The question is whether the clock is running to either a spatial rationale or social relations? The former is the geographical principle of the ‘attrition of distance’, what Binford refers to as the entropy of dismemberment (Binford 1978b: 64).

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