With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Paul Goldberg and an international team of colleagues will investigate undisturbed combustion features from Middle Palaeolithic and some Upper Palaeolithic deposits from caves in Israel (Kebara, Hayonim) and France (Pech de l'Aze IV) The team brings together U.S., Italian, German and Spanish specialists in archaeology, geology, mineralogy, and paleobotany to examine how Neanderthals and modern humans constructed and used fireplaces.
The use of fire is an important, and sometimes controversial, aspect of human behavior. A number of approaches have been used to evaluate the effects of burning (e.g., thermoluminescent, and magnetic properties, such as magnetic susceptibility, thermal alteration of stones, and oxidation features) in attempting to determine whether burning took place at all, and whether burning was a natural or human-related phenomenon. More recently, other techniques have been used to provide detailed characteristics of human-made combustion features, such as temperature and conditions of burning. These analytical studies have made use of bulk samples that have provided average values for the sediment as a whole. Other studies of combustion features and pyrotechnology have emphasized the spatial placement of fireplaces within a living space. Structural and micromorphological study of combustion and ashy features from Kebara Cave showed that they are products of discernible individual and repeated burning events that took place in the same place. As such, they represent discrete activity episodes, rather than several events that took place over years, or decades. The first aim of this project is to assess the technological aspects of fire use as a means to appraise the behavioral significance of short-term burning events principally during the Middle and the Upper Palaeolithic. The second aim of this study is to develop and refine appropriate analytical strategies in order to maximize the information related to pyrotechnology in both periods.
The intellectual merit of this study is revealed by the detailed examination of combustion features with a high degree of temporal and spatial resolution. All researchers will analyze the identical thin sections prepared by impregnating intact, undisturbed features. This approach maintains the contextual integrity of combusted and non-combusted material within the true space of the deposits. It provides detailed, in situ analytical data and allows for direct comparisons among all the combustion features analyzed. The use of soil micromorphology, scanning electron microscopy, Infrared Micro-Spectrometry, organic petrology, and phytolith analysis of the combustion feature will provide information on the temperature reached, the combustion conditions, and the nature of the fuel used including its state of preservation and season of collection; all can be related to aspects of human activity. Such a multifaceted approach performed on the same samples has not been undertaken previously and will provide new and more accurate views of Palaeolithic behavior, specifically, greater insight on how Neanderthals and modern humans constructed and used fireplaces.
The broad impacts of this study are several fold. This type of detailed analysis has the potential to reveal differences in activities and behavior between H. sapiens and Neandertals, providing a more complete picture of human evolution, adaptations, and lifestyles. The results and protocols developed here can be expanded to combustion features from other Middle and Upper Palaeolithic sites and to those from Lower Palaeolithic sites. The strategy will enable detailed comparisons of individual events and short-term activities throughout the Palaeolithic where evidence of fires is preserved, thus permitting the monitoring of hominid behavior over significant portions of human history.
