Les Cottés Sequence: A New Lens for Investigating the Cultural Changes Occurring during the Middle to the Upper Paleolithic Transition.

Summary

During the transition from the Middle to the Upper Paleolithic in Europe, the replacement of Neanderthal populations by Anatomically Modern Human ones is concomitant of major cultural transformations. Progressively, human population incorporated new raw materials in their personal gear cumulating into an explosion of the cultural material diversity. Les Cottés in France preserves a detailed sequence with levels attributed to the late Mousterian, Chatelperronian, ProtoAurignacian and Early Aurignacian. Through combined zooarchaeological and lithic technology approaches we investigate how the need for new raw material extracted from mammals’ body impacted the lithic tools production. Our results underline a strong interaction between needs and technological production. They also suggest that the changes we observed are related to major changes through time in how and for what for the site was used. Thus it is not only the technology that was impacted by the development of these new needs, but also the logistic organization of the society itself.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Connecting Middle Paleolithic Datasets: The Interplay of Zooarchaeological and Lithic Data for Unraveling Neanderthal Behavior

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15781