Transcript Slide 1

Amy Clark
Some background about me:
• I went to college at New York University in New York City
• There, I began to study archaeology which I had been
interested in since learning about the Maya in elementary
school
• Now I am in graduate school at the University of Arizona.
• I study the Middle and Upper Paleolithic, specifically about
30,000-200,000 years ago- during the Ice Age
• This is the time period when we first see modern humans
in Europe and the Near East and they cohabitated with
Neanderthals
• Neanderthals are the most recent archaic human- the only
one who lived at the same time as modern humans and with
whom we may have interacted.
BASIC NEEDS:
• Subsistence (food and water)
• Shelter (clothing and housing)
• Reproduction of the of the culture (marriage,
kinship, education)
• Need for explanation (religion, philosophy,
science)
• Need to communicate (language, art, music)
SUBSISTENCE (food and water):
• Both Neanderthals and early modern
humans living during the Paleolithic (ice
age) were hunter-gatherers.
• What are hunter-gatherers?
Hunter-gatherers are…
• People who find food and water by walking
across the landscape looking for sources of
food. They hunt animals and they collect wild
fruits, vegetables and grains.
• Archaeologists can understand a lot about
the subsistence of Neanderthals and early
modern humans because the majority of
what we find is the remains of these
activities.
Typical Paleolithic archaeological excavations:
The most common artifacts found in Paleolithic sites
are:
1. Stone tools
2. Animal bones
What can we learn from Stone Tools?
• What activities they are doing at the site:
using tools for scraping hides, for cutting
wood and other materials or for killing game?
• Where they are traveling around on the
landscape: We can look at the material that
the tools are made out of, and trace it to it’s
source.
• How complex is their thought pattern: Are
they making very simple tools or are they
making ones the require a lot of planning and
forethought?
What can we learn from animal bones left at the
site?
• What they ate: did they prefer reindeer, mammoth,
or goat?
• How they butchered the animal: did they use every
last bit of the animals or did they only eat the
meatiest parts?
• How they transported the animal: based on the
animal parts left at the site, did they bring only the
limbs back to the site or did they transport the entire
animal?
Evidence for shelter in the Paleolithic:
• Caves and rock shelters
• Constructed dwellings
What is this shelter made out of?
Evidence for reproduction of the culture
(though kinship, marriage, education) in the
Paleolithic:
• This is difficult to know because we have to
acquire it through indirect evidence.
• What is indirect evidence?
• It means that we cannot make conclusions about
their culture based on primary evidence- we only find
stone tools and animal bones at the archaeological
sites and these do not give us information about how
families were structured, how people may have
mated or formed marriages, and how their
educational system might have worked.
• Instead, we must turn to looking at modern day
hunter-gatherers for information, or what
archaeological artifacts might tell us indirectly.
Levallois Technique
• For example, there are
certain distinct ways of
making stone tools that
are found in certain areas
for many years. These
techniques are so unique
that they would have
been needed to have
been taught to the next
generation. This is
evidence for some level
of education that is taking
place.
• Based on modern hunter-gatherer groups, we can
also conclude that Paleolithic groups were also most
likely egalitarian.
• What does egalitarian mean?
• Unlike our current society where some people are
more wealthy or have more political and social status
then others, in egalitarian all people are equal.
• This is common in hunter-gatherer societies where
people live in small groups and where all food and
wealth is distributed evenly among its members.
Need for explanation (religion, philosophy, science):
• This is even more difficult to understand for the
Paleolithic
• There are some art forms which some
archaeologists argue are religious icons.
“Venus Figurines”
• We can also make some conclusions about
religious belief when we find burials.
• What do human burials indicate?
• Belief in the afterlife? Love and affection for
the deceased? Or simply a way of disposing
the body so that it doesn’t attract animals or
cause disease?
• For Neanderthals, it isn’t clear what human burial
indicates.
• They did bury their dead, however, which is
remarkable but did they do it because of religious
belief or simply practicality?
• If possessions were found in the grave, this would
indicate a belief in the afterlife, but this hasn’t been
proven for Neanderthals.
• For modern humans, some of the burials are very
elaborate and have many grave goods which almost
certainly means that they had some sort of belief in
life after death.
Need to communicate (language, art, music):
• For Neanderthals, all of these things are debated.
• There have been some beads associated with
Neanderthal stone tools which are both a form of art
and communication but some argue that these
beads weren’t actually made by archaeologists.
• We don’t know whether Neanderthals could talk.
Some think that it wasn’t physically possible
because of the morphology of their throat but it’s
impossible to know for sure.
• For early modern humans, we have LOTS of
evidence for art, music, and, of course, we assume
that they could communicate using language.
• MUSIC:
• ART:
Grotte de Lascaux
Grotte de Pech Merle
Grotte de Font-de Gaume