ArcheoFOSS 2022
Smallest-scale movement: Tracing the intra-site relocation of hunter-gatherers

Panel 2. Moving in the past: open solutions for dataset design, spatial analysis and spatial statistical methods to investigate movement in Antiquity

Spatial analysis in archaeology is familiar with numerous examples of an “umbrella” of similar archaeological remains, which covers different processes behind the spatial distribution of artifacts, features, and sites. Artifact concentrations (artifact clusters) composing Paleolithic and Mesolithic open-air camps are also the case. These artifact concentrations reflecting hunter-gatherer intra-site activities are often treated for being functioned synchronously to each other. Passing through the ethnographic “analogies”, the oversimplified hypothesis on synchronicity of clusters narrows the variability of behavioral patterns in the remote past to the lifeways of modern hunters, gatherers and fishers.

Alternatively to hypothetical synchronizations, this paper summarizes our recent quantitative approaches enabling to trace the hunter-gatherers relocation inside an open-air camp. The research procedure integrates the analysis of artifact curation (spatial replacement of blade parts), spatial distribution of fire (location of hearths), and the lithic assemblages structure. Case study based on the data from Lubra 10 site on the North European Plain exemplifies the patterns in smallest-scale movement of people, which may be traced archaeologically (the data is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7022689.

License

This text is released under CC BY-ND 4.0 International license. Copyright by Aleksandr Diachenko and Iwona Sobkowiak-Tabaka 2022.