With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Randall White and an international team of colleagues will conduct three years of excavation at the 34,000 year-old site of Abri Castanet, France, one of the key sites for understanding the initial dispersal of modern humans and their Aurignacian culture into Western Eurasia. The Castanet excavations provide precious information concerning the dispersal of moderns from Africa between 50,000 and 30,000 years ago. In this period, the Neandertals and their Mousterian culture were replaced by physically modern humans whose Aurignacian culture showed innovations rarely before seen on earth. Abri Castanet is one of the key European sites to have yielded evidence of these new behaviors : engravings/ paintings, bone weapons and tools, personal ornaments and exotic raw materials. The work at Abri Castanet contributes robust data to an understanding of 1) Mousterian/Aurignacian interactions across the replacement range, 2) of the cultural processes of replacement, and 3) of differences in the internal workings of the societies concerned.
The team assembled by Dr. White is composed of twenty research scientists representing 19 universities and laboratories from 6 different countries. From 2007 through 2009, the Castanet excavations will explore the organization of human activities across approximately 25 contiguous square meters of occupational surface. The initial Aurignacian occupants moved directly onto a bare bedrock platform, allowing the Castanet team to map this bedrock surface and to document the ways in which its uneven, complicated morphology conditioned, and was modified to accommodate, Aurignacian activities.
Particular emphasis will be placed on the excavation of on an enormous fire feature, extending over almost all of the remaining area to be excavated. Aurignacian fireplaces of this type have not been excavated in SW France since the NSF-funded Abri Pataud project of the 1950's and 1960's. Since that time, there have been considerable advances in archaeological science, including : . thin-section analysis of sediments to determine fire temperature and number of re-lightings; . extraction of microscopic residues including plant remains and debris from tool and weapon manufacture; . study of carbonized plant remains; The application of these and other methods, in the context of a state-of-the-art excavations, yields important insights into ancient human behavior concentrated around such fire features.
The intellectual merit of the Castanet project will be to undertake an imaginative and rigorous international collaboration combining diverse strengths of different national traditions in paleoanthropology. It combines geologists, anthropologists, prehistorians, botanists, and geographers, working toward a single goal recognized as important by the international scientific community. It applies innovative methods of archaeological excavation and analysis to the resolution of a challenging scientific problem.
The broader impacts of the work at Castanet are that it provides important data and research collections for future generations of scientists and contributes modern quality data to several questions about early modern humans including chronology, raw material provisioning, seasonality, animal and plant exploitation, technological organization, art and personal adornment. Just as importantly, the Castanet excavation creates a forum for improving international understanding between Americans and Europeans, both among researchers and among student participants. The scientific and cultural experience of young American researchers and students at Castanet establishes a foundation for professional relationships and for new avenues of research, collaboration and understanding.
