Changing weapons in a mutable landscape: exploring the relationship between Upper Paleolithic weaponry variability and drastic environmental changes in Western Europe

Summary

Lithic industries from the European Late Pleistocene archaeological record are marked by the presence of one of the most numerous and diverse set of artifacts identified as projectile weaponry tips. Variability in the morphology and technology of these tools has long been used for organizing the Upper Paleolithic archaeological record into distinct cultural and chronological units – the so-called techno-complexes – validating a direct association between transformations in projectile technology and shifts in other domains (e.g. subsistence, technology) of hunter-gatherers’ adaptive systems. Widespread cultural changes occurring during this time-span are frequently thought to have been triggered by abrupt climate events and some of the modifications occurred in the design and technology of projectiles have been putatively defined as technical solutions to enhance performance and reduce risk in changing environments.

This paper represents a first attempt to characterize how modifications in the design of Upper Paleolithic lithic projectiles correlate with abrupt environmental changes and how they possibly enhanced human fitness under particular selective environments.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Global Perspectives on the Impact of Drastic Environmental Changes in Hunter-Gatherer Technologies

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Spatial Coverage