Chapter 1: Overview
The site of Pech IV contains an important sequence of Middle Paleolithic occupations by Neandertals in the Dordogne region of southern France. At the time that these groups lived here, Europe was a considerably different landscape than today. The northern glaciers of the Pleistocene (Ice Ages) fluctuated over time in their geographical extent. When they were most expansive, many parts of Europe resembled a tundra or steppe, in other words, a vast open plain with scarcely a tree to be seen. Hugh herds of now extinct animals, such as the woolley mammoth and ancient forms of horses, as well as animals that we can see today, such as reindeer, roamed this ice age tundra. In the south of France, however, even during the coldest parts of the Ice Ages, rockshelters and caves in the many deeply incised and wooded river valleys provided areas that were more hospitable.
Pech IV is one of these caves. The sequence of Neandertal occupations here shows a number of changes in the stone tool assemblages over time, as well as in how the cave was used. Some of these may reflect long-term behavioral responses to environmental and climatic changes associated with the Ice Ages, such as those that reflect cooler or warmer intervals and thus differences in the types of animals that were present in the landscape. Reindeer, for example, reflect colder periods and a relatively open landscape, while red deer are indicative of somewhat warmer and more wooded conditions. Other temporal changes, however, may be due to prehistoric economic concerns such as the depletion in the nearby vicinity of good quality stone for making stone tools or perhaps even to shifts in behavioral traditions that result from innovations in how tasks are accomplished.
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• 1. Overview
• 2. Background
• 3. Preliminary Work
• 4. The Mousterian at Pech
• 5. The Living Floors
• 6. The XYZ Layers
• 7. The Asinipodian at Pech
• 8. Conclusions