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Chapter 4: Site Formation
Researchers who specialize in the Paleolithic period are interested in gaining a better understanding of ancient behaviors. For the Middle Paleolithic period in France, a site such as Pech IV has the potential to yield important information about the behavior of Neandertals. There is much debate in both professional publications and public media, such as newspapers, magazines, and TV specials, about the role of Neandertals in the evolution of modern humans. (1) To answer questions about the relationship of Neandertals to modern humans, we need to have not only their fossilized bones and DNA, but also a clear picture of the types of activities they engaged in, whether they were mobile or sedentary, what sorts of animals they hunted or scavenged, choices they made when selecting stone to make stone tools, and so forth.
The most ideal situation in which to recover behavioral information is to find archaeological sites that yield "living floors," or occupation surfaces. This is the concept of having a moment frozen in time, much as what happened to Pompeii when a nearby volcano exploded and the entire town was perfectly preserved even down to the food on the table inside people's houses. Most archaeological sites, however, do not have living floors because these small snapshots of time undergo many changes between when people were at a site and the hundreds or thousands of years later when archaeologists dig there.
These changes are called site formation processes, and can be both cultural and natural in origin (see the movie "What is Geoarchaeology?" below). For example, a group of Neandertals at Pech IV might build a fire both for warmth and for cooking. While the fire is going, they cook a chunk of horse over the fire, cut up the meat when it is done, drop the bones in the fire as additional fuel to keep it going, and perhaps leave a few stone tools near the fire. After they leave Pech IV, dirt blown into the cave begins to slowly accumulate and bury the hearth. At some point, Neandertals return and build another fireplace near the first one, disturbing its contents. Perhaps some of the original charcoal and burnt bone gets kicked around a bit and essentially smeared across the dirt on the cave floor. This group of Neandertals also eventually leaves. More dirt accumulates and small chunks of rock fall from the cave roof and land on the hearths. If the rocks are large enough, they can crush charcoal and animal bone in the hearths, as well as splatter hearth contents across the floor of the cave.
Because of these kinds of processes, what were once discrete living floors of two separate occupations are now melded into one. It would be extremely difficult for a researcher to distinguish these two separate occupations and the exact activities that characterized each. In most cases for the Middle Paleolithic period, we also would not be able to determine if the two hearths were in use at the same time or not. This is because our dating techniques for periods as ancient as the Middle Paleolithic are not as precise as pinpointing calendar years. Our example of two hearths is a relatively simple one. Imagine now that these and other sorts of natural and cultural processes are constantly on-going over periods of thousands of years at a site like Pech IV. Isolating individual living floors in this type of context and being able to interpret each distinct set of behaviors would be a nearly impossible task.
Next Chapter: Establishing Chronology >>
• 1. Overview
• 2. Middle Paleolithic Stone Tool Industries
• 3. Mousterian Assemblage Variability
• 4. Site Formation
• 5. Establishing Chronology
• 6. Interpreting Spatial Data
Neandertal
Extinct group of hominids who lived in Western Eurasia (Europe and the Middle East) between about 130,000 and 30,000 years ago. Their relationship to anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) is the subject of much on-going debate. Some researchers believe that Neandertals were a separate species (Homo neanderthalensis), who went extinct without contributing to the gene pool of modern humans. Other researchers think that Neandertals are part of modern human ancestry, so that the differences between them and us are at the subspecies level (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis). There is also much debate about whether Neandertals exhibited behavioral strategies that we would identify as modern.
