North of the Wall: Archaeo-ecological Approaches to Scotland’s elusive Paleolithic Past

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Research into the Late Pleistocene of Europe" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For more than a century, Paleolithic Scotland was missing from the textbooks, presumed nonexistent. A low-density of archaeological finds was compounded by a research tradition that persistently excluded the possibility of human settlement at the extreme edge of north-west Europe prior to the Holocene, a situation at odds with decades of paleoenvironmental research. Recent discoveries of unequivocal Late Upper Paleolithic (LUP) sites have provided indisputable evidence for human activity in Late Pleistocene Scotland, yet research continues to be held back by both a lack of investigation and a lack of conventional finds. With specific reference to the Paleolithic archaeology of Scotland, this talk will explore the perceptual barriers that can inhibit research, as well as the challenges of understanding the human past where little conventional archaeological evidence belies an undoubted human presence. PAlaEoScot (People, Animals, Landscapes and Environments of Late Glacial Scotland) will be introduced, a new research initiative from the University of Aberdeen which centers on the use of archaeo-ecological and multi-species approaches to explore the low visibility archaeology of LUP Scotland. The first results will be presented, including new radiocarbon dates and isotopic analyses of paleontological materials, illuminating the chronological and ecological context of post-glacial recolonization in Scotland.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Interdisciplinary Research into the Late Pleistocene of Europe   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39255.0