Session: #487

Session, made up of a combination of papers, max. 15 minutes each

The very end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene is characterized by both climatic amelioration and rapid evolution of the European cultural landscape. How these changes occurred as well as their palaeoethnographic consequences are currently at the centre of debates concerning the evolution of European hunter-gatherer lifeways. At the beginning of the Holocene a demographic pulse has been documented that is often associated with an expansion of dietary diversity. These conditions, along with the novel environmental context, were undoubtedly important driving factors affecting both the economic and social organization of these last hunter-gatherers groups. The objective of this session is to investigate these changes as documented by the study of material culture and the reconstitution of past technical behaviours in the broadest sense (tool/toolkit production and use, hunting and subsistence strategies, art and symbolic aspects, settlement organisation, etc.). We particularly welcome case studies and regional syntheses focusing on south-western and central Europe. The ultimate goal is to build from local to global: beginning with the regional evidence, we hope to identify regularities that would allow us to propose varying scales of Pan-European change, as well as explore the tempo of these changes within and between regions.

Early Holocene, technological behaviour, Mesolithic

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Adriana Soto (Spain) ¹

Benjamin Marquebielle (France) ²
Davide Visentin (Italy) ³