With the support of the National Science Foundation, Dr. Margaret Conkey will expand research concerning the prehistoric peoples who lived at the end of the Ice Age in the Central Pyrenees region of southern France , where they decorated caves and implements with animal and other images, as part of successful hunting-gathering ways of life by both Neanderthals and modern humans. Building on a decade of original archaeological survey and geo-morphological analysis, Conkey's research team has recovered more than 5000 stone tool artifacts from plowed fields and vineyards, attesting an extensive life style outside of the well-known cave sites within a 260 square kilometer region. They now have a robust collection of stone tools, primarily made from flint, from both caves and the open air, which can be analyzed to better understand the movements of these mobile hunter-gatherers ,their sense of "territories" in terms of where to obtain their valued flint resources, and what implications these resource procurement patterns might have for understanding social relationships and land use. These are questions that can only be partially addressed from the abundant cave archaeology that has predominated to date.
The primary goal of the project is to develop an extensive reference catalogue of the different flint sources used by these prehistoric peoples, building upon a successful pilot project that has been analyzing geological and archaeological samples of flint from the survey region. Analysis of the flint raw material from some well-dated cave deposits has already demonstrated precisely where the cave occupants obtained their flint, which allows a definitive link to be made between the cave occupants and a specific flint source and a newly discovered open air site, found as part of the project's initial survey and test trenching activities. The highly specialized analyses of the flint samples to obtain a "signature" of their characteristics, which will allow the differentiation of flints, will be carried out by Dr. Sebastien Lacombe, from the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail , who has been a collaborator and overseeing project lithic analysis. He will use a suite of new techniques for the determination of the geochemical structure of the flint sources, including multiple microscopic analyses that have previously not been carried out in combination for the identification of different flints.
This research project will continue to involve undergraduate and graduate students in the laboratory and field, from several different countries and universities. The research is being conducted within the context of a formal convention for collaborative research between UC Berkeley and the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail developed by Conkey and Lacombe. The laboratory where some of the research is being carried out is often visited by K-12 students as part of an outreach program, and Berkeley undergraduates are formally enrolled in an Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program. The project will contribute to understanding hunter-gatherer mobility, to the methods of landscape archaeology, to the interpretation of Paleolithic cave sites ( including those with art) within a regional context, and to materials sciences approaches to the characterization of a most ubiquitous raw material resource for prehistoric peoples everywhere in the world, namely, flint.
