Session: #591

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

The Late Glacial-Early Holocene witnessed not only relevant climatic fluctuations but also cultural innovations that marked a turning point in human behaviour and subsistence strategies throughout the European continent.

Much of what is currently known about this period in Europe (considered here roughly c. 15 – 8 kyr), relies mainly on investigations of lithic and bone archaeological assemblages. Such studies have provided insights into how techno-typological diversity reflects human adaptations to changing climate and ecosystems. However, key aspects concerning settlement patterns, natural resource exploitation and how climatic shifts may have shaped the behaviour of the last prehistoric hunter-gatherers remain unexplained. Investigation of sediments is crucial to unravel these questions since it can provide direct evidence of hominid use of space, the distribution of activity areas at an intra-site level and palaeoenvironments at local and regional scales.

The objective of this session is to bring together multiscalar interdisciplinary research that focuses on archaeological sediments from Late Glacial-Early Holocene deposits. Our goal is to shed light on the sedimentary evidence of human behaviour (e.g. combustion residues; occupation surfaces; midden deposits) and related palaeoenvironments (e.g. 14-12,9 kyr Interstadial; 12,9-11,6 kyr Younger Dryas; 8,2 kyr cold event, Late Glacial and Early Holocene sedimentary and soil dynamics).

We welcome contributions on Late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic sites from Europe and elsewhere using geoarchaeology, palaeoecology, organic chemistry and any other relevant interdisciplinary method as well as ethnography and experimentation to address the sedimentary signatures of climatic shifts and coeval human activities.

Late Glacial-Early Holocene, Sediments

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Ana Polo-Diaz (Spain) ¹

Vera Aldeias (Portugal) ^2,3
Natàlia Égüez (Spain) ⁴