Flint Sources and Intraregionality Mobility in the Paleolithic of the French Midi-Pyrenees

在国家科学基金会的支持下，玛格丽特·康基博士将扩大对生活在法国南部中比利牛斯地区冰河时代末期的史前民族的研究，他们在那里的洞穴和工具上装饰动物和其他图像，作为尼安德特人和现代人成功狩猎-采集生活方式的一部分。在十年的原始考古调查和地理形态分析的基础上，康基的研究团队已经从犁过的田野和葡萄园中找到了5000多件石器文物，证明了260平方公里区域内著名洞穴遗址以外的广泛生活方式。他们现在拥有强大的石器收藏，主要由火石制成，来自洞穴和露天，可以进行分析，以更好地了解这些流动狩猎-采集者的活动，他们在哪里可以获得宝贵的火石资源的“领地”意识，以及这些资源采购模式可能对理解社会关系和土地使用产生的影响。这些问题只能从迄今为止占主导地位的丰富的洞穴考古中部分得到解决。该项目的主要目标是在一个成功的试点项目的基础上，编制这些史前民族使用的不同打火石来源的广泛参考目录，该试点项目一直在分析调查地区的打火石地质和考古样本。对一些年代准确的洞穴沉积物中的打火石原材料的分析已经准确地展示了洞穴居住者从哪里获得他们的打火石，这使得洞穴居住者与特定的打火石来源和新发现的露天地点之间建立了明确的联系，这是该项目初步调查和测试挖掘活动的一部分。对打火石样本进行高度专业化的分析，以获得其特征的“签名”，从而区分打火石，将由图卢兹-勒米拉尔大学的Sebastien Lacombe博士进行，他一直是该项目的合作者和监督项目的岩石分析。他将使用一套新技术来确定打火石来源的地球化学结构，包括以前从未联合进行的多种显微分析，以识别不同的打火石。这项研究项目将继续包括来自几个不同国家和大学的实验室和现场的本科生和研究生。这项研究是在加州大学伯克利分校和由Conkey和Lacombe开发的图卢兹-勒米雷大学之间的合作研究正式会议的背景下进行的。作为外展计划的一部分，K-12年级的学生经常会访问正在进行一些研究的实验室，伯克利的本科生也正式参加了本科生研究学徒计划。该项目将有助于了解狩猎-采集活动，景观考古方法，在地区范围内解释旧石器时代洞穴遗址(包括有艺术品的洞穴遗址)，以及材料科学方法，以确定世界各地史前民族最普遍的原材料资源，即打火石。

With the support of the National Science Foundation, Dr. Margaret Conkey will expand research concerning the prehistoric peoples who lived at the end of the Ice Age in the Central Pyrenees region of southern France , where they decorated caves and implements with animal and other images, as part of successful hunting-gathering ways of life by both Neanderthals and modern humans. Building on a decade of original archaeological survey and geo-morphological analysis, Conkey's research team has recovered more than 5000 stone tool artifacts from plowed fields and vineyards, attesting an extensive life style outside of the well-known cave sites within a 260 square kilometer region. They now have a robust collection of stone tools, primarily made from flint, from both caves and the open air, which can be analyzed to better understand the movements of these mobile hunter-gatherers ,their sense of "territories" in terms of where to obtain their valued flint resources, and what implications these resource procurement patterns might have for understanding social relationships and land use. These are questions that can only be partially addressed from the abundant cave archaeology that has predominated to date. The primary goal of the project is to develop an extensive reference catalogue of the different flint sources used by these prehistoric peoples, building upon a successful pilot project that has been analyzing geological and archaeological samples of flint from the survey region. Analysis of the flint raw material from some well-dated cave deposits has already demonstrated precisely where the cave occupants obtained their flint, which allows a definitive link to be made between the cave occupants and a specific flint source and a newly discovered open air site, found as part of the project's initial survey and test trenching activities. The highly specialized analyses of the flint samples to obtain a "signature" of their characteristics, which will allow the differentiation of flints, will be carried out by Dr. Sebastien Lacombe, from the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail , who has been a collaborator and overseeing project lithic analysis. He will use a suite of new techniques for the determination of the geochemical structure of the flint sources, including multiple microscopic analyses that have previously not been carried out in combination for the identification of different flints. This research project will continue to involve undergraduate and graduate students in the laboratory and field, from several different countries and universities. The research is being conducted within the context of a formal convention for collaborative research between UC Berkeley and the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail developed by Conkey and Lacombe. The laboratory where some of the research is being carried out is often visited by K-12 students as part of an outreach program, and Berkeley undergraduates are formally enrolled in an Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program. The project will contribute to understanding hunter-gatherer mobility, to the methods of landscape archaeology, to the interpretation of Paleolithic cave sites ( including those with art) within a regional context, and to materials sciences approaches to the characterization of a most ubiquitous raw material resource for prehistoric peoples everywhere in the world, namely, flint.