Assemblage formation and Paleolithic variability in the Middle Prut Valley region (Romania)

Summary

The research I will report in my paper has two main goals. The first is to learn something of the behavior of the hominids responsible for the production and accumulation of the Middle and Early Upper Paleolithic assemblages at two multistratified sites in NE Romania, Middle Prut Valley region (Ripiceni-Izvor and Mitoc-Malu Galben). The second goal is methodologically related. Paleolithic assemblages recovered from the archaeological record are mostly interpreted as "typical" expressions of cultural identity. Yet assemblages are also a product of formation processes, they accumulated over varying time spans, with various artifacts combinations and discard rates, and represents therefore the context of complex relationships, as opposed to essentialist view of static types The excavation methods used at those two sites provide us with the opportunity to exmine the assemblage formation by focusing on differential rates of deposition, of the whole assemblages ratehr than relative frequencies. As shown in several recent studies, this will allow us to understand how the characteristics of the conventionally defined assemblages have evolved during the long occupational histories of those two sites.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage