Culture-Environment Relationships and Heinrich Stadial 1 in Western Europe: Are Ecological Niche Shifts Implicated?

Summary

A common theme among Upper Paleolithic studies is how hunter-gatherer adaptations may be related to environmental variability, with some focusing on how culture-environment relationships during the Paleolithic are intertwined with ecological niche dynamics. The reason being that when faced with the rapid-scale climatic fluctuations and environmental reorganizations characteristic of MIS 3 and 2, Paleolithic populations could have responded in a variety of ways. Ecological niche modeling methods applied to the archaeological record (Eco-cultural niche modeling: ECNM) have aimed to better understand how specific populations responded to Dansgaard-Oeschger climatic variability and identify those instances for which technological or adaptive shifts correspond to shifts in the ecological niches exploited by archaeological populations. For example, the technological changes between the Proto-Aurignacian and the Early Aurignacian were roughly coincident with Heinrich Stadial 4 and an expansion of the exploited ecological niche. This study shifts focus to the latter Upper Paleolithic and targets the Early and Middle Magdalenian archaeological cultures, the latter corresponding to Heinrich Stadial 1. ECNM is used to evaluate whether adaptive shifts observed between these cultures are associated with a niche shift and results are evaluated against a larger framework of culture-environment interactions that considers pre-LGM and LGM contexts as well.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Human adaptations to environmental change during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene - Part 1   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage