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，Margaret Conkey博士将扩大对生活在法国南部中比利牛斯山脉地区冰河时代末期的史前民族的研究，他们在那里用动物和其他图像装饰洞穴和工具，作为尼安德特人和现代人成功的狩猎采集生活方式的一部分。 在十年原始考古调查和地理形态分析的基础上， Conkey的研究小组已经从耕地和葡萄园中找到了5000多件石器文物，证明了在260平方公里的区域内，著名的洞穴遗址之外的广泛生活方式。他们现在有一个强大的收集石器工具，主要由燧石制成，从洞穴和露天，可以分析，以更好地了解这些移动的狩猎采集者的运动，他们的“领土”的意义，在哪里获得他们宝贵的燧石资源，以及这些资源采购模式可能对理解社会关系和土地使用的影响。这些问题只能从迄今为止占主导地位的丰富的洞穴考古学中部分解决。该项目的主要目标是在一个成功的试点项目的基础上，为这些史前民族使用的不同燧石来源编制一份广泛的参考目录，该项目一直在分析调查区域的燧石地质和考古样本。对一些年代久远的洞穴沉积物中的燧石原料进行的分析已经准确地表明了洞穴居住者从何处获得燧石，从而可以确定洞穴居住者与特定燧石来源和新发现的露天地点之间的联系，这是项目初步调查和测试挖沟活动的一部分。 对燧石样品进行高度专业化的分析，以获得其特征的“签名”，从而可以区分燧石，这将由图卢兹-勒米拉伊大学的Alftien拉科姆贝博士进行，他一直是合作者并监督石器分析项目。他将使用一套新技术来确定燧石来源的地球化学结构，包括以前没有结合用于识别不同燧石的多种显微镜分析。该研究项目将继续吸引来自几个不同国家和大学的本科生和研究生在实验室和实地参与。 这项研究是在加州大学伯克利分校和图卢兹大学之间的合作研究的正式公约的背景下进行的，由Conkey和拉科姆贝开发。作为推广计划的一部分，K-12学生经常访问正在进行一些研究的实验室， 伯克利的本科生正式参加了本科生研究学徒计划。 该项目将有助于理解狩猎采集者的流动性，景观考古学的方法，在区域范围内解释旧石器时代的洞穴遗址（包括那些有艺术品的洞穴遗址），以及材料科学方法来描述世界各地史前人民最普遍的原材料资源，即燧石。

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.