Review Article

The ghosts of the Palaeolithic: individual agency and behavioural change in perspective

Paul Pettitt
Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield, Northgate House, West Street, Sheffield S1 4ET, UK

Antiquity 81 no. 314 December 2007

CLIVE GAMBLE & MARTIN PORR (ed.). The hominid individual in context: archaeological investigations of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic landscapes, locales and artefacts. xii+327 pages, 68 figures, 31 tables. Abingdon: Routledge; 0-415-28433-3 paperback £25.

DIMITRI DE LOECKER. Beyond the site: the Saalian archaeological record at Maastricht-Belvédère (The Netherlands) (Analecta Praehistorica Leidensia 35/36). viii+300 pages, 129 b&w & colour illustrations, 55 tables, CD-ROM. 2004. Leiden: University of Leiden Faculty of Archaeology; 90-76368-12-0 (ISSN 0169-7447) paperback €80.

ERELLA HOVERS & STEVEN L. KUHN (ed.). Transitions before the Transition: Evolution and Stability in the Middle Paleolithic and Middle Stone Age. xxiv+332 pages, numerous b&w illustrations, tables. 2006. New York: Springer; 0-387-24658-4 hardback $99.

LINDA R. OWEN. Distorting the Past: Gender and the Division of Labor in the European Upper Paleolithic (Tübingen Publications in Prehistory). iv+240 pages, 37 illustrations, 7 tables. 2005. Tübingen: Kerns; 3-935751-02-8 hardback €39.95.

Palaeolithic archaeologists have often taken a 'collective' perspective on human behavioural change, with many coming to believe that the meaningful action of individuals is invisible in the archaeological record. Gamble (1999) has bravely championed what may be termed an 'individualist' perspective on the period, exploring how individuals negotiated societies and how Palaeolithic material culture may have played a role in such 'upwards' constructions of society. Since his call to arms a number of attempts of variable quality to identify individual agency in the Palaeolithic have been published. It is ironic that while some Middle and Upper Palaeolithic 'Pompeiis' have yielded remarkable examples of individual activities, individuals at such sites are rarely glimpsed doing something of great interest — usually they are knapping flint or lying dead in a grave. Thus one is largely reduced to relying on a perceived social importance of everyday activities in order to identify and interpret individual agency in the Palaeolithic. Four recent publications bear on the issues of individuals and innovation to varying degrees.

The hominid individual in context

Gamble and Porr have assembled 15 attempts to tease out individual agency in the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic periods. One or two are little more than verbose collections of terminology and concepts; a few arguably say more about bifaces than humans; and a few do not really grapple with the agenda (such as otherwise excellent summaries of the Lower Palaeolithic archaeology of Bilzingsleben in Thuringia and Schöningen in Lower Saxony in Germany). Despite this, some individuals shine through. Gamble and Gaudzinski, in an innovative survey of Middle Palaeolithic faunas, argue that the fragmentation (i.e. division and sharing) of carcasses was critical to individual social negotiation. This fascinating theory may have applications in the wider realm of material culture as I discuss below. Henshilwood and d'Errico place recent finds from the South African Middle Stone Age into wider perspective, arguing that the individual innovations that underpinned the emergence of 'modern' human behaviour may have been historically contingent and do not need to be seen as points in a continuum of behavioural evolution. Pope and Roberts, in a survey of the relationship between bifaces and faunal scatters at Boxgrove in southern England , argue that structured land use, including structured discard of bifaces, best explains the patterning they see around 500 Kyr BP. The book should not be ignored: as Dobres states in her concluding remarks, it outlines considerable potential for understanding the role of Palaeolithic individuals in social life, even in the absence of tangible traces of them in an archaeological record that usually takes the form of a palimpsest. It does, however, mirror the social archaeology of the Palaeolithic in microcosm: while some of the contributions will be lost to history, the agency of several will shine through.

Maastricht-Belvédère

Traces of the quotidian are meticulously analysed in de Loecker's volume. 14 in situ archaeological sites were excavated between 1980 and 1990 from the fine-grained Unit IV fluviatile sediments in the Belvédère district of Maastricht in the Netherlands, which can be compared within an overall landscape as they all correspond to a close period of time. Major excavations and test-pitting demonstrated that within the Saalian interglacial (c. 250 000 BP) a rich number of lithic artefacts accumulated on the banks of the Meuse river. This 'veil of stones' takes the form of high-density patches and low density scatters. De Loecker's treatment of these materials is exhaustive. It is supported by colour coded photographs of refitting lithic sequences and should, deservedly, become a major reference for anyone wishing to understand Lower and Middle Palaeolithic technology. Although de Loecker deals in detail with all Unit IV sites, Site K, with over 10 000 lithic artefacts, from which 17 per cent could be refitted, serves as his main reference. The similarity of raw materials and technological strategies between each of 17 major on-site refitting reduction sequences, the fact that these reduction events 'respect' each other spatially and define a circle, and that materials were moved between each cluster leads de Loecker to argue, convincingly, that they were all broadly contemporary. The different reduction events could therefore be interpreted as the result of the actions of several individuals grouped in a rough circle, around whatever the focus of their activity was. From an individual perspective this could be seen as tangible evidence of a collective undertaking, perhaps with sharing at its core (sensu Roebroeks 2001). One can take this a little further. Large nodules of raw material were imported to the site, divided into usable cores, each of which was then reduced in a separate spatial area. This calls to mind the social importance of the fragmentation of carcasses noted by Gamble and Gaudzinski above. Were lithics treated in a similar way to carcasses? From a social point of view there is, after all, great similarity between a carcass and a nodule of flint. The procurement of each requires a good technical knowledge of the landscape and sheer physical effort; each needs to be divided up into usable units which are then passed on to specific individuals who 'consume' them in the context of a social theatre.

Middle Palaeolithic and Middle Stone Age transitions

Kuhn and Hovers present 18 papers which address the nature of variability in the European and Levantine Middle Palaeolithic (MP) and African Middle Stone Age (MSA). The major problem the editors seek to address is that the former has come to be seen as 'uncoordinated, [with] change over time…slow and directionless' compared with what in recent years has come to be seen as an 'increasingly precocious' African Middle Stone Age. Contributions focus variably on continental-scale trajectories of change; distinctions between behavioural variability and directional (i.e. diachronic) change; the potential consequences of geography on behaviour; and the influence of terminology on research. Most contributions to this impressive volume share the conclusion that directional behavioural trends are difficult to identify in both the MP and MSA, while there is considerable evidence for regionally expressed change which is contingent and directionless and which probably relates to locally varying climates and environments, and that the European MP contained trajectories which differed radically from those of the African MSA. Thus it can be said that there were many transitions before the transition (i.e. to behavioural modernity), which differs in content (apparently symbolism) and by its permanence.

This is more of a group-focus book than one of obvious importance to 'individualists.' As Mellars notes in his foreword, from an evolutionary perspective only a small proportion of individual trajectories would have lead to the long-term survival of groups. Most papers make very strong contributions to this broad subject area, and here I shall note only a few highlights. Gaudzinski surveys monospecific faunas of the European MP. These appeared after 200 kyr BP and reveal meaningfully different prey selection strategies from this time onwards, remaining very similar through to the Late Upper Palaeolithic. Stiner surveys changing forager interactions with small animals, demonstrating that when Neanderthals bothered with small animals, they exploited slow-reproducing ones, whereas the more reliable faster-moving small animals should have given a demographic advantage to the Upper Palaeolithic populations for whom they were more important. She suggests that an increase in procurement of slow-moving animals in the late MP after 50 kyr BP may have been stimulated by Neanderthal population growth; but from the perspective of individual innovation it is important to note that this did not lead to the Upper Palaeolithic. Kuhn, in a review of MP Italy, also notes how the distinct trajectories of Latium and Liguria failed to lead to the Upper Palaeolithic, and introduces the ecological concept of 'rugged fitness landscapes', in order to explore how, in his view, a limited range of technological options were redeployed and recombined region to region to meet adaptive pressures. His argument is convincing, and points to how individual Neanderthals were repositories of variable skills which were flexibly employed as environments and resources required, rather than directional social innovators archaeologists have come to see for later periods. While this is therefore not a book for 'individualists' it is an excellent introduction to the nature of long-term behavioural change among Neanderthal and early modern human societies.

Gender and tools in the Magdalenian

The prey-selection strategies that Gaudzinski identifies as originating in the MP are often seen as culminating in the Late Upper Palaeolithic. Owen's experimentally-based study of the German Magdalenian is designed, by contrast, to draw out the role of female individuals from the dogmatic picture of male hunters she believes still underpins our attitude to Upper Palaeolithic archaeology. She begins by reviewing the ethnographic literature and finds that while there is plenty of evidence for the contribution of women to the subsistence of hunter-gatherers there is a clear reporting bias towards the role of male hunting. After this she presents a detailed and invaluable review of small animal and plant resources in the ethnographic literature, and then moves on to the archaeological record, in this case the Magdalenian of southern Germany and northern Switzerland. Her points are sound and one should be sympathetic with her conclusion that we should 'unbias' our reconstructions and consider both the role of women and the use of material culture for non traditional tasks. We do need to escape from western notions of what particular tools should do, and Owen is challenging when she asks us to consider that bone needles have wider uses than for sewing clothing (e.g. for basketry). However, I found it difficult to follow a suggestion that Aurignacian split-based bone points could have been used as sewing or weaving implements (they are variable in size and often large and in my opinion are most sensibly interpreted as armatures). Owen's logic here is that needles are absent from the Aurignacian and thus split-based points would have fulfilled this role; but the alternative is that Aurignacians worked clothing simply, perhaps in similar ways to Neanderthals, or that they used needles of vegetal materials, and if one removes split-based points from their armoury there is little in the lithic realm that would take their place. These points aside, the strength of Owen's work is to reorient our interpretative biases and recognise the Magdalenian as the broad-spectrum and culturally complex adaptation it was.

Groups and individuals

There are clear indications among these books that Early Palaeolithic individuals were able to deploy their knowledge and skills for social negotiation. Archaeologists now need to understand where flexible behavioural repertoires reside — whether knowledge can be reduced to the individual or whether, from an evolutionary perspective, it resides more among and between individuals, i.e. at the level of the social group. This is the cultural equivalent of the Dawkins vs Gould argument as to where natural selection occurs, and for this, most would favour at least a degree of group selection. Although current archaeological thinking, to my mind, over-privileges the individual, these four books do show how innovative approaches to all scales and qualities of Palaeolithic data call up these ghosts in meaningful ways.

References

GAMBLE, C. 1999. The Palaeolithic Societies of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

ROEBROEKS, W. 2001. Hominid behaviour and the earliest occupation of Europe: an exploration. Journal of Human Evolution 41: 437-61.