Give Me Shelter: Reverse Engineering a Paleolithic Home

Summary

This is an abstract from the "More Than Shelter from the Storm: Hunter-Gatherer Houses and the Built Environment" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Humans today are ubiquitous shelter makers but despite this, relatively little is known about the construction of the earliest shelters built by palaeolithic humans. While there is possible evidence for earlier shelters, archaeological evidence in Europe and Asia indicate shelter construction had become habitual by the Upper and Epi-Palaeolithic, coinciding with the extreme climate of the Last Glacial Maximum. Most of these data result in 2-Dimensional footprints of fire hearths, activity locations, post holes, and possible thatching material. This provides a rough shape and indicates what materials were used but leaves the method of construction of these shelters to be largely hypothetical in nature. Looking to understand the interwoven nature of shelter, subsistence and thermoregulation at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, the authors set out to construct a shelter that would match the archaeology of Upper Palaeolithic sites. Setting as conditions a shelter which would require a minimal time investment, retain heat effectively, repel moisture, and be constructed using stone age tools and materials, the authors used ethnographically derived examples of shelters constructed in colder climates. The process, methodology, and implications of effective shelter building for human evolution are discussed in this presentation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• More Than Shelter from the Storm: Hunter-Gatherer Houses and the Built Environment   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25804