Settlement patterns, contacts and networks. A diachronic study of the stoneage in the alpine region, a case study from the Allgäu (Forealps and Alps)

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Research on settlement history and distribution and communication networks of commodities and ideas is one of the basic issues of pre and protohistory.The diachronic researcha of such networks within selected regions as well as synchronic studies and comparisons between regions offer insight into the variability and differences in social behavior and conflict resolutions within and between social groups or triggered by environmental influences. The study area is shortly labeled Allgäu. It ranges from the lake Constanz in the west, to the river Lech in the east and from the high alpines in the south to the Alpine upland with its upper moraines in the north. This area is characterized by several conditions favorable for a research project dedicated to landscape archaeology: - the landscape is diversified, especially due to the different altitudinal belts which enforced the variability of strategies to act within the different zones- a comparatively high number of detected archaeological sites from Palaeolithic to the Neolithic and even Metall ages, even if they consist mainly of surface finds, related to the actual land use as permanent grassland with bad survey conditions, but with good contacts of our project working group to the private finders and private owners of the finds - the given first but not sufficient insights into the used lithic rawmaterials and first references on their provenience for the time slices in focusAs desideratum (also valid for neighboring regions), which the projects works on, can be listed: - At the moment, quantitative research on lithic inventories is missing- a relevant number of analyzed samples using natural scientific methods of the provenience of the lithic materials is missing- a reconstruction of the settlement and activity patterns within the characterized landscapes is not existing. This could be realized relying on the omnipresent lithic artefacts. - a scientific framework of research is missing which proposes models and probabilities of different models in comparison for communication and exchange of resources within mobile and sedentary parts of prehistoric societies within transalpine regions.