Uncertainty Specialists: A Diversity of Late Upper Paleolithic Adaptations in the Dinaric Alps

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.

This paper looks at the results of recent research at several late Upper Palaeolithic sites in the area of the Dinaric Alps within the Eastern Adriatic catchment zone in present-day Montenegro and Herzegovina. For the first time in this region, a long-term persistence of the phenomenon of broad spectrum dietary strategy focused on the hunting of marmots has been recognized, with parallels in broadly contemporaneous sequences found in the Italian, French, and Swiss Alps. Apart from these likely seasonal hunting camps on marmots, it seems that longer-term aggregations, which might have represented “persistent places” on the landscape, can also be recognized as part of the regional settlement system. We have employed diverse methodologies in order to shed light on the examined sequences: radiocarbon dating, Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS), aDNA analyses, use-wear analyses. Based on these different strands of data, we discuss the emerging picture of Late Pleistocene forager adaptations in this region, and to what extent these novel insights match the existing models of forager residential mobility during unpredictable environmental and climatic conditions. In doing this we evoke the memorable phrase “uncertainty specialists,” coined by Clive Gamble when discussing broadly contemporaneous foragers in the Epirus region of Greece.

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): 40448.0