Regional Open-Air Survey in the French Midi-Pyrenees

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With National Science Foundation support Dr. Margaret Conkey and her colleagues will conduct one season of archaeological fieldwork in the Pyrenees region of southern France. For the last several years the group has conducted preliminary surveys and located surface material which date to Magdalenian times, about 16,000 to 13,000 years ago. Based on the distribution of such artifacts it is possible to reconstruct prehistoric settlement patterns and the distribution of people and activities across the landscape. During the current project the group will expand this work and carry out very intensive survey of carefully selected areas. Limited test excavations will be conducted to locate materials in sealed stratigraphic contexts and a program of lake coring will be continued to recover pollen which permits the reconstruction of past climates. Magdalenian peoples are responsible for the cave paintings at sites such as Lascaux and for beautiful carved bone plaques and figurines. These also were the first groups to concentrate on subsistence resources such as fish and these behaviors laid the path which led to the domestication of plants and animals. Although archaeologists have excavated Magdalenian sites for over a century, almost all research has focused on cave and rockshelter deposits and very little is known about other habitation contexts. On the basis of available knowledge it is not possible to reconstruct demography or settlement patterns and Dr. Conkey's research with its focus on open air occurrences is designed to fill this gap. The Pyrenees region is which she works has both cave paintings and rock shelters and her work will provide an important counterpart to these. Late Paleolithic peoples equipped with stone tools and dependent on hunted and gathered resources expanded the environmental range inhabited by humans and were able to survive at relatively high altitudes. Dr. Conkey and her research team work in such an area and the project will thus shed light on the limits of human adaptability.