The Importance of Short Duration Archaeological Sites for Contextualizing Forager Organization: An Argument from the Middle and Upper Paleolithic of central Portugal

Summary

The majority of Late Pleistocene archaeological sites in central Portugal resulted from short-term forager activities on the scale of days or weeks. This paper explores the analytical and theoretical significance of these small, ephemeral sites for understanding Middle and Upper Paleolithic organization of technology and settlement strategies. The interpretive context provided by short term site assemblages is essential for developing robust regional hypotheses of Paleolithic behavior, including the local scale of MP raw material selection, a complex Gravettian settlement strategy for the Rio Maior region, and increasingly reliable and standardized technological organization during the Magdalenian. The variability in formation processes at different activity duration scales is an often neglected line of evidence for evaluating anthropological models of prehistoric forager adaptations, an oversight that creates a large-site bias and frequently leads to erroneous archaeological conclusions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Short-Term Occupations in Paleolithic Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15365