João Cascalheira - Short-Term Occupations in Paleolithic Archaeology: Definition and Interpretation

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Critical aspects for understanding prehistoric lifestyles concern the ways in which hunter-gatherers moved on the landscape and how they organize their technological and subsistence strategies in relation to the surrounding landscape. Ethnographic studies suggest that the various mobility strategies, and the archaeological sites that are formed on the landscape as a result, depend on complex relationships between resource composition and distribution, topography, geographic location (e.g., seasonality), as well as demographic and social factors. Because of this complex interplay and the flexibility of human decision-making, it is not yet clear how the various factors are reflected in the management of the territory of hunter-gatherer groups. In the last decades, many studies applied such ethnographic concepts to the archaeological record, attempting to understand the settlement behavior of prehistoric humans. Short-term prehistoric occupations, which might have generated a variety of archaeological contexts (locations, hunting camps, temporary stations, etc.), must have been much more abundant on the landscape yet are difficult to identify in archaeology because of the very short span of time involved and the limited amount of cultural material left behind. In order to get a better understanding of these limitations, new methodological and interpretative approaches are needed in Paleolithic studies to disentangle the archaeological palimpsests and achieve higher resolutions on the lifestyle of prehistoric foragers.

This volume is the result of the symposium that one of the editors (A.P.), along with Erella Hovers, organized at the Society for American Archaeologists (SAA) conference in Vancouver in 2017. Some of the participants to the SAA symposium contribute with papers, whereas other specialists were invited to participate to this volume in order to increase the chronological and geographical coverage on the topic of short-term occupations in Paleolithic archaeology. The aim of this book is to contribute to a better understanding on how past hunter-gatherer communities adapted and moved in different environmental contexts across time. In compiling this volume, we hope to encourage other researchers to highlight the behavioral variability of archaic humans in low-density sites pointing to a broader comprehension of when and how different subsistence and mobility strategies arose during the Pleistocene.

We wish to thank the symposiums participants and the discussant Steven Kuhn and the contributing authors for their excellent work. We are especially grateful to Lawrence Guy Straus, Andrew Kandel, Anthony E. Marks, and Thorsten Uthmeier for their valuable comments on and constructive reviews of the chapters. We would also express our gratitude to Teresa Krauss, Hana Nagdimov, and Kimberly Poss of Springer Press for providing invaluable guidance and support during the preparation of this volume.