Neanderthal Short-Term Occupations in Open-Air Sites: An Overview from Eastern Germany

Summary

Prehistoric hunter-gatherers frequently relocated in order to avoid foraging in previously depleted areas, and lakes and rivers played important roles in these movements as fix locations on the landscape where foragers could have access to water and ambush parched animals. The types of human occupations along lakes and rivers could have been various according to the aims of displacements (e.g., logistical, residential) and the activities carried out at the shore (e.g., bivouac, hunting station, base camp). Repeated settlements on the same areas could have generated palimpsests rich of archeological artefacts that are not always easy to disentangle and interpret. However, the discrimination of the raw materials and the comparison of the lithic assemblages with experimental knapping materials could be indicative of the integrity of the operative chains and the type of artifacts transported off-site. This paper aims to present new data on some Middle Paleolithic open-air sites located in lakeshores and riverbanks in Eastern Germany. The results indicate that the settlements were of short-term occupations and that Neanderthals applied different strategies of production and artefacts exports off-site.

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): 15358