The Mediterranean from 50,000 to 25,000 BP: Turning Points and New Directions

Description

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. 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