Multimillennial Neanderthal occupation at La Cotte de St. Brelade

The BBC has a brief news story about some of the results of new excavations conducted at the site of La Cotte St. Brélade (Jersey, Channel Islands). The site is perhaps most famous for having yielded clear evidence for the systematic slaughter of mammoths and wooly rhinos by Neanderthals, which prompted a reevaluation of their hunting abilities (Scott 1980). That analysis, however, suggested that these animals were accumulated at the site over brief timespans.

The question of how long Neanderthals occupied La Cotte is where the overview of this new research project gets especially interesting:

"La Cotte's collapsed cave system contains intact ice age sediments spanning a quarter of a million years, revealing a detailed sequence of Neanderthal occupation and occasional abandonment, against a background of changing climate.

"The site is the most exceptional long-term record of Neanderthal behaviour in North West Europe," says Dr Matt Pope from the Institute of Archaeology at University College London.

"At La Cotte, we get to see far more than a glimpse of their behaviour, we get to see generation upon generation of Neanderthals returning to the same place under lots of different environmental conditions."

In other words, this new fieldwork (including investigations at other sites, btw) is shedding very interesting new light on how Neanderthals occupied the sites under different conditions, and - most importantly - why their behavior varied over time. As someone who's argued for a long time for the need to develop methods that allow us to develop long-term diachronic perspectives in order to understand the full range of Paleolithic lifeways (e.g. Riel-Salvatore and Barton 2004, Riel-Salvatore et al. 2008), I'm very excited about such reports. It'll also be extremely interesting to see how the artifacts collected in older excavations compare to those found by the new project. This new project, incidentally, has a nifty little web site that provides a lot of pertinent information about the new project at La Cotte and nearby sites, as well as other components of their research agenda, including some underwater survey. Check out The Quaternary Archaeology and Environments of Jersey project (which includes one team member who's commented on this blog before).

References

Riel-Salvatore, J., & Barton, C. (2004). Late Pleistocene Technology, Economic Behavior, and Land-Use Dynamics in Southern Italy American Antiquity, 69 (2) DOI: 10.2307/4128419

RIEL-SALVATORE, J., POPESCU, G., & BARTON, C. (2008). Standing at the gates of Europe: Human behavior and biogeography in the Southern Carpathians during the Late Pleistocene Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 27 (4), 399-417 DOI: 10.1016/j.jaa.2008.02.002

Scott, K. (1980). Two hunting episodes of middle Palaeolithic age at La Cotte de Saint-Brelade, Jersey (Channel Islands) World Archaeology, 12 (2), 137-152 DOI: 10.1080/00438243.1980.9979788

12th Street Mammoths

What's not to love about mammoths and the street artists that dig them? And also because we just love mammoths, here at AVRPI...



Shot while strolling down on 12th St., Denver, CO, April 24th, 2010.

Do you mammoth?

"Now entire villages are surviving on the trade in mammoth bones. And a new verb has entered the vernacular: mamontit, or "to mammoth" -- meaning, to go out in search of bones."

The LA Times has an article about one of the side-effects of the ongoing 'shrinkage' of permafrost in Russia (likely due to global warming): more mammoth carcasses are turning up. So much so, in fact, that it's engendered a whole industry based on the recovery and exportation of mammoth ivory. While the scale of this 'industry' is increasingly staggering, as the article notes, it's not exactly a novel phenomenon, although the intensity at which it's now unfolding certainly is

In truth, this trade is not entirely novel. Man has been hunting mammoths in Russia's icy north as far as memory reaches. The permafrost holds bones that bear workmanship from the Stone Age -- which scientists in Siberia sometimes call the "bone age" in homage to the many weapons and tools hacked from mammoth bones.

What is most troubling about this is the fact that frozen mammoths are a non-renewable resource (that just sounds odd to write!). Really, just like archaeological sites, every mammoth carcass potentially offers a wealth of evidence about the biology and behavior of these extinct animals, most of which will be lost unless it is properly recovered at the find spot. Not paying sufficient attention to context results in that much less information we can get on those shaggy beasts. I'm fully sympathetic to the 'people are doing this so they can eat' argument; that said, most of the people interviewed on the record in the article don't exactly seem to be part of the huddled masses this new form of 'mammoth hunting' purports to save from a life of misery. In fairness, one of the bone hunters does mention they're getting 'carbon' dates from the remains, but how good is the association, and what happens if the date is useless due to contamination or whatnot? And shouldn't they also be collecting DNA samples and contextual paleoenvironmental data? I don't know... the whole piece strikes me as describing more the culture modern 'mammoth cowboys' (and it's not flattering) than any kind of legitimate, justified and ultimately scientifically useful practices.

Mammoth hunters of the Russian Far East

They found one of their camps, apparently.

The site, found during a 2007 archaeological expedition to Lake Evoron, is the largest of four Stone Age sites, discovered near the Amur River so far, and was most likely established by mammoth hunters.

"We came to this conclusion after studying flint pikes, arrowheads and a stone scraper," Malyavin said, adding that a comprehensive archaeological excavation could take a couple of years.

Wait, what? Where the hell are the mammoth bones?! There better be some serious use-wear/blood residue analysis being undertaken if they want to make the case that people were hunting mammoths based on stone tools alone.