Harald Floss

Among the earliest Homo sapiens societies in Eurasia, the Aurignacian phase of the Early Upper Paleolithic, approximately 40 000–30 000 years ago, mammoth ivory assumed great social and economic significance, and was used to create hundreds of personal ornaments as well as the earliest known works of three‐dimensional figurative art in the world. This paper reports on the results of micro‐PIXE/PIGE analyses of mammoth‐ivory artifacts and debris from five major sites of Aurignacian ivory use. Patterns of variable fluorine content indicate regionally distinctive strategies of ivory procurement that correspond to apparent differences in human–mammoth interactions. Preserved trace elements (Br, Sr, Zn) indicate that differences at the regional level are applicable to sourcing Paleolithic ivory at the regional scale.

This contribution presents about 30 painted pebbles from Le Mas d’Azil which have been recently detected in the Staatliches Museum für Archäologie à Chemnitz (Germany). This study retraces the history of these pieces since their discovery at the site and demonstrates that they have been directly donated, in 1899, by the excavator Édouard Piette to the royal collection of prehistory at Dresden. The identification of their origin makes it unlikely that they represent forgeries and offer an important addendum to the existing inventory of these emblematic pieces of French prehistory.

Cette contribution est consacrée à une trentaine de galets peints du Mas d’Azil qui ont été dénichés récemment dans le Staatliches Museum für Archäologie à Chemnitz (Allemagne). L’étude retrace l’historique muséographique de ces pièces et rappelle qu’elles ont été directement offertes, en 1899, par le fouilleur Édouard Piette à la collection royale préhistorique du musée de Dresde. L’identification de la provenance rend peu probable le fait qu’il s’agisse de contrefaçons et offre un complément important à l’inventaire de ces pièces emblématiques de la préhistoire française.

Large river valleys have long been seen as important factors to shape the mobility, communication, and exchange of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. However, rivers have been debated as either natural entities people adapt and react to or as cultural and meaningful entities people experience and interpret in different ways. Here, we attempt to integrate both perspectives. Building on theoretical work from various disciplines, we discuss the relationship between biophysical river properties and sociocultural river semantics and suggest that understanding a river’s persona is central to evaluating its role in spatial organization. By reviewing the literature and analyzing European Upper Paleolithic site distribution and raw material transfer patterns in relation to river catchments, we show that the role of prominent rivers varies considerably over time. Both ecological and cultural factors are crucial to explaining these patterns. Whereas the Earlier Upper Paleolithic record displays a general tendency toward conceiving rivers as mobility guidelines, the spatial consolidation process after the colonization of the European mainland is paralleled by a trend of conceptualizing river regimes as frontiers, separating archaeological entities, regional groups, or local networks. The Late Upper Paleolithic Magdalenian, however, is characterized again by a role of rivers as mobility and communication vectors. Tracing changing patterns in the role of certain river regimes through time thus contributes to our growing knowledge of human spatial behavior and helps to improve our understanding of dynamic and mutually informed human-environment interactions in the Paleolithic.