The Palaeolithic Settlement Of Europe

Palaeolithic societies have been a neglected topic in the discussion of human origins. In this book, which succeeds and replaces The Palaeolithic Settlement of Europe, published by Cambridge University Press in 1986, Clive Gamble challenges the established view that the social life of Europeans over the 500,000 years of the European Palaeolithic must remain a mystery. In the past forty years archaeologists have recovered a wealth of information from sites throughout the continent. Professor Gamble now introduces a new approach to this material. He examines the archaeological evidence from stone tools, hunting and campsites for information on the scale of social interaction, and the forms of social life. Taking a pan-European view of the archaeological evidence, he reconstructs ancient human societies, and introduces new perspectives on the unique social experience of human beings.

A major survey of the prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies of Europe, this book reviews the topical information and interpretations for scientific research. Palaeolithic studies are at an exciting point of transition. The explosion in ethno-archaeological studies has fundamentally challenged our models and interpretations amongst all classes of data and at all spatial scales of analysis. Furthermore the traditional concerns of dating and quaternary studies have also passed through their own revolutions and palaeolithic archaeology is the direct beneficiary. Dr Gamble presents in an imaginative but comprehensive framework our changing perspectives of Europe's oldest societies.

This book, first published in 1936, studies the cultural development of the food-gathering peoples of the western end of the plain of Northern Europe.

In this worldwide survey, Clive Gamble explores the evolution of the human imagination, without which we would not have become a global species. He sets out to determine the cognitive and social basis for our imaginative capacity and traces the evidence back into deep human history. He argues that it was the imaginative ability to 'go beyond' and to create societies where people lived apart yet stayed in touch that made us such effective world settlers. To make his case Gamble brings together information from a wide range of disciplines: psychology, cognitive science, archaeology, palaeoanthropology, archaeogenetics, geography, quaternary science and anthropology. He presents a novel deep history that combines the archaeological evidence for fossil hominins with the selective forces of Pleistocene climate change, engages with the archaeogeneticists' models for population dispersal and displacement, and ends with the Europeans' rediscovery of the deep history settlement of the Earth.

The Earliest Europeans explores the early origins of man in Europe through the perspective of ‘a year in the life’: how hominins in the Lower Palaeolithic coped with the year-round practical challenges of mid-latitude Europe with its distinctive temperatures, seasonality patterns, and available resources. Current research has provided increasingly robust archaeological and Quaternary Science records, but there are ongoing uncertainties as to both the earliest Europeans’ specific survival strategies and behaviours, and the character of their dispersals into Europe. In short, how sustained and ‘successful’ were the individual phases of European occupation by Lower Palaeolithic hominins and what sorts of ‘human’ where they? Using a season-by-season chapter structure to explore, for example, the contrasting demands and opportunities of winter versus summer survival, Hosfield explores how foods and other resources would vary across the four seasons in quantity and quality, and the resulting implications for hominin behaviours. Text boxes provide the background on key issues, and the book draws on a range of supporting evidence including technology (e.g. the nature of Lower Palaeolithic stone tools; the evidence for organic tools), hominin life history (e.g. the length of infant dependency; the nature of ‘parenting’; the implications of different mating models; the Social Brain Hypothesis), cognitive studies (e.g. brain scanning research into possible planning capabilities) and potential bias in the archaeological record (e.g. in terms of what is and isn’t preserved). By testing the likelihood of different scenarios by comparing short-term, site-based insights with long-term, regional trends, Hosfield is able to out forward ideas on how our earliest European ancestors survived and what their lives were like.

This volume focuses on the evidence from the Middle Paleolithic, assessing it in its own right rather than looking at it for signs of the development of 'modern humans' as they become recognisable in the subsequent Upper Paleolithic period. It provides useful regional reviews of the evidence from different regions of Europe. It is the second of three volumes on the phases of the Paleololithic being sponsored by the European Science Foundation. (The first was the Earliest Occupation of Europe - ed. W. Roebroeks, Leiden 1995). Contents: The Middle Paleololithic - a point of inflection (Clive Gamble and Wil Roebroeks); Environments and settlements in the Iberian peninsula (Luis Gerardo Vega Toscano, Luis Raposa and Manuel Santojana); The Neanderthals in Italy (M Mussi); Environment and adaptations in Eastern central Europe (Jiri Svorboda); The Middle Palaeolithic of Quercy (J Jaubert); The Middle Paleolithic of the Aquitaine Basin (Alain Turq); The Northwest European Middle Paleolithic (Wil Roebroeks and Alain Tuffreau); Hominids without homes - The Nature of Middle Palaeolithic settlement in Europe (J Kolen); Surface scatters from Southern Limburg, the Netherlands (Jan Kolen et al); Raw Material Transport Patterns (J Feblot-Augustins); The Faunal Record of the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic of Europe (S Gaudzinski). "