New Excavations at La Ferassie (France)

在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，Harold Dibble和Alain Turq将与一个大型的国际跨学科团队合作，在La Ferrassie（法国多尔多涅）的旧石器时代中期遗址进行三个季节的挖掘。拉费拉西的最初挖掘工作发生在20世纪之交，发现了许多尼安德特人的个体和其他特征，这些特征表明遗址内的空间安排（可能具有象征意义）和尼安德特人遗骸的故意埋葬。此外，La Ferrassie是Ferrassie Mousterian的同名遗址，这是一个相对罕见的中旧石器时代工业。在La Ferrassie重新进行的挖掘将提供关于尼安德特人仪式和殡葬行为的新的详细信息，这是尼安德特人生活的一个重要但有争议的方面，对人类文化特征的进化具有重大意义。尼安德特人对待死者的方式是一个在古人类学研究中争论了几十年的话题，但在现代挖掘和文献技术出现之前，大多数关于这个问题的证据都被发现了。由于此类发现的罕见性，获得新数据通常更多地是由于偶然，而不是明确的研究设计。然而，《La Ferrassie》显然有可能提供关于这个问题的新资料，从而对辩论作出重大贡献。新的挖掘工作将继续建立在其他近期工作的标准之上，这些工作涉及数据恢复的精确度、准确性和完整性，以避免困扰早期这种性质的发现的各种模糊性。该项目将明确鼓励来自世界各地的本科生和代表性不足的学生参与挖掘过程，为下一代考古学家提供重要的研究经验和培训。还制定了通过网络和纪录片提供非正式公共教育的计划。

With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Harold Dibble and Alain Turq, in collaboration with a large international, inter-disciplinary team, will spend three seasons of excavation at the Middle Paleolithic site of La Ferrassie (Dordogne, France). The original excavation of La Ferrassie, which took place around the turn of the 20th century, revealed a number of Neandertal individuals and other features that suggested both a deliberate arrangement of space within the site (possibly with symbolic significance) and deliberate burial of the Neandertal remains. In addition, La Ferrassie is the eponymous site for the Ferrassie Mousterian, a relatively rare Middle Paleolithic industry. The renewed excavations at La Ferrassie will provide new and detailed information on Neandertal ritual and mortuary behavior, an important yet controversial aspect of Neandertal life that has tremendous significance for the evolution of human cultural traits in general. Neandertal treatment of the dead is a topic that has been debated for decades in paleoanthropological research, but most of the evidence on this subject was recovered before the advent of modern techniques of excavation and documentation. Because of the rarity of such finds, having new data is usually due more to chance than it is to an explicit research design. It is clear, however, that La Ferrassie has the potential to provide new information on this subject and thus contribute significantly to the debate. The new excavations will continue to build on the standards of other recent work concerning the level of precision, accuracy, and completeness of data recovery in order to avoid the kinds of ambiguity that has plagued earlier finds of this nature. This project will explicitly encourage the participation of undergraduate and underrepresented students from all over the world in the excavation process, providing important research experiences and training for the next generation of archaeologists. Plans are also developed to provide informal public education through the web and film documentary.