The passage between the periods which we call Middle and Upper Palaeolithic has long held a special fascination for Palaeolithic archaeologists, but over the past ten years or so it has gone right to the top of the list of 'hot' research topics. Underpinning it all is genuine and apparently enduring public interest in what actually happened at this point in human history. Why so much public interest? Well, it's us, isn't it? - bright, clever, intelligent modern humans replacing those tiresome and deeply flawed, if quite charming, Neanderthals. Modern behaviours, art, population explosion, economic revolution, all happening at once well, probably, or possibly well, maybe not. This book is a highly informative progress report on the state of current research concerning the passage from Middle to Upper Palaeolithic, focusing on the Mediterranean.
Author(s): Marta Camps, Carolyn Szmidt
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Year: 2009
Language: English
Commentary: Some papers originally presented at a symposium held at the Society for American Archaeology Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, Mar, 31, 2005.
Pages: 376
City: Oxford
Tags: Paleolithic period -- Mediterranean Region -- Congresses; Paleolithic period -- Europe -- Congresses; Excavations (Archaeology) -- Mediterranean Region -- Congresses; Excavations (Archaeology) -- Europe -- Congresses; Mediterranean Region -- Antiquities -- Congresses; Europe -- Antiquities -- Congresses.
Foreword
Derek Roe
Introduction
Marta Camps and Carolyn Szmidt
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
Contributors’ Addresses
1 Where there’s a will there’s a way? 30 years of debate on the Mid-Upper Paleolithic transition in western Europe
Marta Camps
2 A crossed-glance between southern European and Middle-Near Eastern early Upper Palaeolithic lithic complexes: Existing models, new perspectives.
Foni Le Brun-Ricalens, Jean-Guillame Bordes and Laura Eizenberg
3 The Middle-Upper Palaeolithic hiatus of insular north Africa
Angela E. Close
4 The evolutions and revolutions of the Late Middle Stone Age and Lower Later Stone Age in north-west Africa
Elena A. A. Garcea
5 Egypt from 50 to 25 ka BP: a scarcely inhabited region?
Pierre M. Vermeersch
6 The shift from the Middle Palaeolithic to the Upper Palaeolithic: Levantine Perspectives
Anna Belfer-Cohen and A. Nigel Goring-Morris
7 The Palaeolithic of Turkey
Marcel Otte and Işin Yalçinkaya
8 Mediterranean southeastern Europe in the Late Middle and Early Upper Palaeolithic: modern human route to Europe or Neanderthal refugium?
Dimitria Papagianni
9 The Early Upper Palaeolithic in Romania: past and current research
Ildiko Horvath
10 Adriatic coast of Croatia and its hinterland from 50 000 to 25 000 BP
Ivor Karavanić
11 Dating and Paleoenvironmental Interpretation of the late Pleistocene archaeological deposits at Divje Babe I, Slovenia
Bonnie A. B. Blackwell, Edwin S. K. Yu, Anne R. Skinner, Ivan Turk, Joel I. B. Blickstein, Dragomir Skaberne, Janez Turk and Beverly Lau
12 Early Upper Paleolithic population dynamics and raw material procurement patterns in Italy
Julien Riel-Salvatore and Fabio Negrino
13 From regional patterns to behavioural interpretation: Assessing the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition in Mediterranean France
Carolyn Szmidt
14 Early evidence of the Aurignacian in Cantabrian Iberia and the North Pyrenees
Alvaro Arrizabalaga, Federico Bernaldo de Quirós, François Bon, María-José Iriarte, José-Manuel Maíllo and Christian Normand
15 The Ebro frontier revisited
João Zilhão
16 Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons in northern Spain: ongoing work at the Sopeña Rockshelter (Asturias, Spain)
Ana C. Pinto-Llona, Goeffrey Clark, Alexandra Miller and Kaye Reed
17 What’s in a name? Observations on the compositional integrity of the Aurignacian
Geoffrey A. Clark and Julien Riel-Salvatore
18 La confusion Aurignacienne: disentangling the archaeology of modern human dispersals in Europe
Paul Mellars
