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The Magdalenian settlement of Europe: An introduction
Quaternary International 272-273 (2012) 1–5
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Guest Editorial
The Magdalenian settlement of Europe: An introduction
1. The Magdalenian concept: archeological construct or dim reflection of a reality? Much (perhaps inordinate) attention has been paid in the last quarter-century to the Middle-Upper Paleolithic Transition, often as if the story of “modern” human adaptations had come fully to fruition by 30,000 years ago. However, more time separated the beginning of the Magdalenian from that “magic” date than separates us from the end of the Magdalenian, and there were vast climatic, vegetational, faunal and even geographic changes between “The Transition” and the Magdalenian and even within the Magdalenian time-frame itself – from cold, open conditions barely improved in Oldest Dryas vis-à-vis the Last Glacial Maximum at the beginning to more temperate, wooded ones during the Late Glacial Interstadial near its end. The Magdalenian of Western and North-Central Europe may represent the stereotypical Upper Paleolithic in terms of technology, subsistence, site and territorial organization, and artistic activity, but it was the result of: 1. a long history of cultural development–at first centered in SW Europe and then extended north- and eastward during the ca. 6000 year-duration of this cultural tradition – and 2. human responses to sharply fluctuating and regionally diverse environmental conditions, from Greenland Stadial 2 to Greenland Stadial 1. The Magdalenian is an old culture-historical unit, but it is our viewpoint that far from being a bankrupt, outmoded, arbitrary archeological construct, this creation of Gabriel de Mortillet is being reconstructed as defining an evolving network of human relations that spread out from SW France and Northern Spain as the human range expanded during the course of the Late Glacial, eventually connecting the Franco-Cantabrian homeland with daughter communities in territories as far north as Switzerland, the Low Countries, Germany, Moravia and Poland, as well as – more controversially – southern England. With a redefinition or reinterpretation of the notion of archeological culture, the concept of the Magdalenian is increasingly finding validity in the independent studies of lithic and other mineral raw materials, marine molluscs, fossils and other exotica, works of portable and rupestral art whose long-distance connections suggest material transport (direct procurement or, more importantly, down-the-line exchange) and/ or the diffusion of ideas embedded in widespread symbol systems. There has been a surprising convergence of conclusions in recent years coming from scholars (often of different paradigms – cultural historical or processual) working in various regions of Europe, from 1040-6182/$ – see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2012.05.022
the Basque Country to Maastricht, from the Rhineland to the Pyrenees, from Asturias to the Périgord, from Ile de France to Andalucía. The work of specialists, such as Gerhard Bosinski, Yvette Taborin, Meg Conkey, Jehanne Féblot-Augustins, Eelco Rensink, Marisol Corchón, Esteban Alvarez, Andoni Tarriño, and many others, in refocusing Magdalenian (and other Upper Paleolithic) research on networks of social relations is salient. In a first phase that lasted about a century, great synthesizers – de Mortillet, Breuil, Obermaier, Peyrony, Cheynier, de SonnevilleBordes – defined and refined ever-more-numerous temporal subdivisions of the Magdalenian, based mainly on lithic artifact types for the early phases and osseous ones for the late phases. Despite speculations about migrations and diffusions, the emphasis was generally on description and classification of diagnostic artifacts. While this archeological tradition did not end, Upper Paleolithic research clearly entered a new phase in the 1960s–70s, with parallel emphases on paleoenvironments, subsistence, settlement, mobility (i.e., adaptive behavior in ecological context). The ability to date Magdalenian levels by radiocarbon, independently of the supposedly temporally sensitive “fossil director” artifacts, allowed archeologists to focus their attention on artifact function and interactions with faunal remains, etc. In the wake of the discovery and (still-ongoing) excavation of the vast, Pompeii-like open-air site of Pincevent in the Paris Basin by André Leroi-Gourhan and his team, Magdalenian research became increasingly “horizontal” and not only vertical, as had been the case when deeply stratified caves and rockshelters completely dominated the record. 2. The Bern INQUA Congress symposium With the “boom” in new Magdalenian excavations and analyses (especially of paleoenvironmental proxy data and subsistence evidence) in the post-World War II period, the time was ripe by the end of the 1970s for new transnational syntheses. The first of these was a colloquium organized at the Université de Bordeaux by Denise de Sonneville-Bordes in 1977: “La Fin des Temps Glaciaires en Europe” (published in 1979). It was followed by “Le Magdalénien en Europe”, a UISPP colloquium in Mainz organized in 1987 by Jean-Philippe Rigaud (published in 1989), and “Le Peuplement Magdalénien”, a symposium held in 1988 at Chancelade for the centenary of the discovery of the Magdalenian skeleton of that name (published under the editorship of Rigaud, Henri Laville and Bernard Vandermeersch in 1992). Several other regional colloquia wholly or partly on the Magdalenian followed in such settings as Île de France, France as a whole, the Pyrenees, the North European
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Guest Editorial / Quaternary International 272-273 (2012) 1–5
Plain, Mediterranean Iberia, Cantabrian Spain, etc., all adding to the impressive corpus of modern-quality data on chronostratigraphy, paleoenvironments, technology, subsistence, art, etc. However, nearly a quarter-century has passed since the Mainz and Chancelade meetings, so, when Straus learned of Bern having been chosen for the INQUA Congress, he immediately thought of the extraordinary work of Denise Leesch and her team at the open-air sites of Champréveyres and Monruz on the shore of the Lac de Neuchâtel, as well as of the classic sites at Schaffhausen, and hence the important role of Switzerland in the story of the Magdalenian northward re-expansion. Switzerland is also well-known for the Magdalenian research of Prof. Hans-Georg Bandi, Prof. Michel Egloff, Prof. JeanMarie LeTensorer and others. Naturally Straus asked Denise Leesch to co-convene this symposium and we decided to include Thomas Terberger, especially so that the “new Magdalenian territories” of the North be well represented. Quite selfishly, Straus also asked Denise to organize an excursion to Neuchâtel and other Swiss Magdalenian sites en route. The first oral session and the poster session were held at the Bern Convention Center and the second oral session was held at the Archeological Institute–thanks to the graciousness of Ebbe Nielsen, himself a Magdalenian researcher in the University of Bern. We were particularly honored by the presence at various venues of the symposium of both Professor Bandi (himself a student of the great Hugo Obermaier) and his illustrious student, Prof. H.-J. Müller-Beck. The accumulation of new sites and analyses, the development of high-precision dating and correlation methods derived from AMS and Greenland ice cores, the growing numbers of collaborations among archeologists and between them and natural scientists – often transnational, as fomented by the European Union and programs such as Erasmus grants – all should justify the present volume as an admittedly incomplete but hopefully fairly representative sample of the active researchers on the Magdalenian and on Tardiglacial environments. While it has been impossible to be completely inclusive, we have assembled papers (based on most of the oral presentations and posters at the Bern INQUA Congress) representing research by teams from Portugal, Spain (both Mediterranean and Atlantic), southern and northern France, Belgium the Netherlands, England (the Creswellian being a late Magdalenian, now known to have participated in the tradition of cave art), Germany, Switzerland, and Poland. Having excavated Magdalenian sites in Cantabrian Spain, SW France, Belgium (and a bit of Epipaleolithic in Portugal), Straus has long been astonished by the great ecological range and great variation of territorial scale and mobility strategies of the Magdalenian oikumene, especially by late Dryas I and Bølling/Allerød times. Magdalenian people with large annual rounds may have hunted migratory reindeer and horses in Northern France or on the Great Plain south of the newly-formed Baltic Lake, but their contemporaries in the mountainous Iberian south depended on red deer and a variety of other less migratory ungulate game, as well as rabbits in Mediterranean Spain and southern Portugal, and, along the coasts, shellfish. In steep, rocky upland areas both in Spain and in montane areas of France, such as the Pyrenees and Alpine fringes, they hunted ibex and chamois. Humans in some territories, as in Cantabria and Aquitaine, made ample use of major salmon streams, while the Mediterranean shores of Andalucía (evidenced by Nerja Cave in Málaga) saw some exploitation of ocean fish (perhaps suggesting the presence of boats) and (beached?) seals. The range of vegetation types across time and space, varying with latitudes (36–54 N), altitudes and exposures, from Mediterranean pine and juniper open woods to Atlantic heath- and grasslands, to steppe-tundra in the north, with possible islands of thickets in local refugia, perhaps such as the Ardennes Plateau, and between the cold of Dryas I and the dramatic warming of the Late Glacial Interstadial (especially in the north) is similarly remarkable. What tied
this world together – this growing world inhabited by the descendants of the Solutrean survivors of the Last Glacial Maximum – was a dense network of social relations, made manifest by baubles from far-off lands (fossils, minerals, distinctive works of portable art), high-quality flints, striking similarities in rock art. In a world of considerable risk and danger, low population density and separated band territories, it makes eminent sense that, like foragers in the Arctic and deserts of southern Africa and Australia, Magdalenian people cultivated contacts with other groups as means of obtaining mates, information, and survival “insurance” (assurance of a nonhostile reception) in times of climatic crisis and resource scarcity, as well as valuable commodities. Trading partners, fictive kin, inlaws, the relations among people could have been direct (in the context of collective hunts, feasts, rituals at important “aggregation sites” such as caves with art “sanctuaries”) or indirect, via downthe-line trade in exotica from band to band, depending on the distances. The ultimate consequence was a Magdalenian world that gave coherence to an actual culture that stretched from Portugal to Poland, one that changed and included considerable variation in modi operandi, but had a reality in widely shared beliefs, symbols and values. Such was one of the first European Unions, like the Gravettian before it. This volume hopes to shed what light many current researchers across this broad stretch of regions can provide to understand the environments and strategies for survival that Magdalenian people practiced – material, social and ideological – in dealing with the great variety and frequent changes with which their late Ice Age world presented them across the millennia of this fascinating period not long in the timescale of human evolution before the dominion of hunting peoples began to yield to the spread of Neolithic farming. The authors include both seasoned fieldworkers with decades of excavation and basic analytical experience and younger scholars who cast fresh light on such important matters as lithic technology and subsistence. They reflect a wide diversity of viewpoints and perspectives that are the fruits of differing national schools or even paradigms of prehistoric archeology. These differences in turn also in part reflect the diverse natures of the Magdalenian archeological records of the various regions of Europe, notably the great divide between the (mainly calcareous) mountainous regions mostly in the south – SW France, Iberia – but also smaller “pockets” in the north (e.g., the Ardennes, Creswell Crags, the Moravian karst, the Swabian and Cracovian Juras) with cave and rockshelter sites (sometimes virtually exclusively, as in the case of Cantabrian Spain) versus the great plains dominated by open-air sites (e.g., northern France, western Switzerland, the loess plateau between Leuven, Maastricht and Aachen, the German Rhineland, eastern Germany). The kinds of archeology that one can do (study of long-term change through time but with palimpsest problems versus intra-site spatial activity analyses but sometimes with poor organic preservation) and thus the ways in which one can (however dimly) perceive the lives of Magdalenian peoples are significantly different and milieu-conditioned; the problems one believes can be addressed and possibly solved are often quite distinct. A cave archeologist in Spain works in a very different milieu from an openair site specialist in Germany. Yet there is something important that links them and that is what many of the papers in this volume seek to demonstrate – either overtly or indirectly. Magdalenian people lived in different worlds, ate different foods, occupied different kinds of sites, annual moved over greatly differing distances, knapped different kinds of stones, and had peculiar local traditions of decoration and “art”. But they were – like modern day archeologists – in contact with one another, sometimes face-to-face, mostly indirectly. Their oikumene was growing and the horizons of humans with some shared symbol systems and – presumably beliefs – were expanding throughout western Europe after humankind had weathered the LGM climatic crisis.
Guest Editorial / Quaternary International 272-273 (2012) 1–5
In July 2011, having (more or less and hopefully) weathered the world economic crisis (and despite the great cost!), archeologists from many European countries and a couple of Americans convened in Bern to present their analytical results and interpretations of the Magdalenian, a 19th century archeological construct but a reality of hunting peoples on the ground arising from the Solutrean refugium population some 21 millennia BP in SW Europe. Much information of differing kinds is presented in the resultant papers published here, despite a few glaring gaps (e.g., Périgord, Czech Republic). Hopefully this tour d’horizon is respectably balanced in terms of geography, themes (from chronological to environmental to lithotechnological to faunal), theoretical perspectives and paradigms. The emphasis is heavily “Europeanist”, but with at least a few hints of the somewhat different “Americanist” point of view, perhaps more anthropological and less geological or historical, although these distinctions – so clear in the 1960s–80s – are increasingly becoming blurred, with greater contact (and even trans-Atlantic training), less domination of the field by just a few great men and women (usually French), more openness, frequent international publication, etc. The distances are being closed and this is particularly the case with the convergence on the study of social networks, come at by different European and American researchers from “hard scientific” (i.e., material sourcing), humanistic (i.e., art stylistic analysis), and social scientific (band relational analysis) perspectives. This new way of thinking about the Magdalenian signals the opening of a promising chapter in the long history of research into the “Reindeer (and Red Deer) Age”. Our one big regret is that the Bern experience was so costly that, aside from the excellent excursion to the Magdalenian sites and the Laténium (archeological) Museum in Neuchâtel, there was little opportunity for discussion, for a genuine sharing of views, an airing of differences, and exchange of hunches, ideas and suggestions. Another time, somehow, this must be organized. It is especially hard for American specialists to participate in the many regional, national, continental and thematic meetings and workshops on Upper Paleolithic that have proliferated in recent years throughout Europe. Indeed, other American researchers had been invited to Bern, but had to refuse due to lack of travel funds. Meanwhile, it is our hope that the papers that follow will both inform and stimulate debate and provoke much e-mail traffic, if not face-to-face contact, much like the Mediterranean shells that made it all the way up to the Neuwied Basin, from hand to hand, from band to band in Magdalenian times. 3. The subjects of papers in this volume The papers in the special issue of Quaternary International address a number of major questions concerning the Magdalenian record. A few focus specifically on associated faunas from both environmental and subsistence aspects (Cuenca et al., Drucker et al.); many others include such information as part of wider regional treatments, most notably Bicho et al. on Portugal with much new information on Late Glacial conditions in the extreme SW end of the Magdalenian range based on both oceanic and terrestrial proxy data. All grapple to varying degrees with the implications of the new chronological frameworks based on AMS dating with radiocarbon calibration and on the Greenland ice cores. Some papers, notably Roman and Villaverde, have a focus on osseous technology. Other papers have a least a partial, but distinct lithic technology focus (e.g., Domingo et al. on core scrapers) and taken as a whole they tend to point to the significant inter-regional differences that exist due to the bedrock (pun intended) facts of lithic raw material variability and differential access to “good” materials. R. Schwendler, building on her comprehensive Ph.D. dissertation, presents a few examples of long- and short-distance traces of social
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networks, hypothesizing the existence of differences between the Magdalenian societies in long-established “home” territories and those of the “frontier”. The themes of contacts, exchanges, movement and “style zones” within or cross-cutting ecological/subsistence provinces run through many of the papers. In the south, this is the key theme of the Utrilla et al. paper on the Ebro Valley as avenue of communication between the Mediterranean and Atlantic parts of the Magdalenian world from start to finish. One of the longstanding questions in Late Glacial research in SW Europe has been what followed the Solutrean phenomenon, when the transition happened, whether it was an in-situ, local process or an intrusive one. Several papers (e.g., Ducasse, Aura et al., Straus and González Morales, Utrilla et al.) address the problem of the Badegoulian or Initial Magdalenian (ex-Magdalenian 0). What is at issue is whether the so-called Badegoulian represented a first phase of the Magdalenian cultural tradition or a separate phenomenon, cut off by the “arrival” of the Magdalenian. First of all, the contrast between southern French, Mediterranean and Atlantic Spanish papers makes it apparent that: 1. The Badegoulian itself (even as defined by the significant presence of raclettes and/or transversal burins) may be quite variable, and not necessarily in a temporal trajectory. 2. Post-Solutrean flake-dominated assemblages are a separate matter, not necessarily associated with Badegoulian diagnostics (this clearly being the case in Cantabrian Spain). 3. There can be considerable continuity between Solutrean and Initial Magdalenian assemblages (as well as site locations and subsistence strategies), belying the theory of population or culture replacements. Indeed the notion of “desolutreanization” (gradual replacement – “battleship curve”-wise – of large, single-component foliate and stemmed projectile point tips by multi-component antler-cum-backed bladelet sagaies) best describes the process in some regions. Continuity in any event was the most likely scenario. Earlier theories of population replacement seem quite unlikely. 4. The end of the Solutrean came somewhat earlier in SW France than in Iberia (just as the Magdalenian seems to have ended earlier in the northern parts of its range than in the south – perhaps because subtle warming trends were more noticeable at the then-extreme end of the human range than in the always more “comfortable” southern homeland). 5. Assemblages with abundant local non-flint raw materials used to make “archaic” tool types (sidescrapers, notches, denticulates, splintered pieces/bipolar cores that may be found at the base of Magdalenian sequences (notably at El Mirón Cave in Cantabria) are not unique within the Upper Paleolithic context and may be the result of particular site functions and circumstantial catchment areas (foraging radii) that did not involve long-range movement or exchange, as opposed to these artifacts being time-space cultural “markers”. While some regions (e.g., Algarve, Portuguese Estremadura), though clearly within the general Magdalenian cultural sphere, were at peripheral extremes and witnessed the development of their own material peculiarities (including distinctive lithic artifacts types and scarcity of osseous artifacts, mobile or rock art) (see Bicho et al.), most attest – especially in the Middle and Upper Magdalenian – intensive inter-regional interaction, all the while maintaining distinctive local diets, settlement systems and technological and artistic localisms. The different styles of harpoons in the Cantabrian and Mediterranean regions are a good example (Roman and Villaverde this volume). The axes of human relations (emphasized by Utrilla et al.) can be traced in material remains – often not quantitatively abundant, but qualitatively eloquent. The classic example is
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Guest Editorial / Quaternary International 272-273 (2012) 1–5
the distribution of contours découpés (outline effigies of horse and other ungulate heads cut out of hyoid bones and generally perforated for attachment to necklaces or clothing) concentrated ca. 14 uncal. ka BP in the central and western French Pyrenees, but with a trail of scattered (or even sometimes cached, as in Tito Bustillo Cave, Asturias) examples that are either perfect examples of the genre or imperfect imitations, both to the east in Languedoc and especially to the west of the Middle Magdalenian super-site of Isturitz in the Spanish Basque Country, Cantabria and Asturias (see Schwendler, this volume). The trail of Upper Magdalenian black outline cave art figures is also clear, but then must ask why it is essentially a central-western Pyrenean and Vasco-Cantabrian pattern. We are on the verge of being able to reconstruct the territories and the routes of Magdalenian folk (maybe even mapped by them, if Utrilla et al. are right about their unusual find in Abauntz Cave, Navarra), and this includes the links between the southern homeland and the new territories to the north and in newly deglaciated and recolonized upland areas such as the Massif Central (see Angevin, this volume). Of course, one of the most important aspects of “the” Magdalenian is that it was a world of hunter bands who, when living on the northern fringes of the LGM refugium in France, began to extend their annual ranges and ultimately their territories into the Paris Basin, into the rather barren, lake-rich, recently deglaciated area of western Switzerland, into the valleys of the Ardennes, across the still-dry English Channel up to the Midlands, up to the loess plains of Flanders, Maastricht and Aachen, into the Rhineland, east to what is now the Czech Republic and southern Poland. Some of the northward pulses of human settlement, probably responses to some of the many minor climatic fluctuations in late Oldest Dryas (GS2a), came even before the dramatic upturn in climate of the Bølling Interstadial (GI 1e), the oldest and most curious of all those currently known being the spread of Middle Magdalenian (à navettes) people into Poland, though there had been even earlier pulses into Switzerland (e.g., Kastelhöhle-Nord) and Germany (e.g., Wiesbaden-Igstadt). These explorations (some failed), pioneering colonizations, and finally the establishment of human territories in the north that would even withstand the short, but dramatic cold crises within the Last Glacial Interstadial and especially Younger Dryas are the subjects of the papers on northern France, Switzerland, England, Belgium, SE Netherlands, Germany and Poland. During the process of reviewing the manuscripts that make up this volume, it became apparent that for northern Europeans it was difficult to accept that in the south there were still “Magdalenian” assemblages (with circular section harpoons at least in Cantabrian Spain) in the period between 12 and 11.5 uncal. ka BP; as Straus noted some time ago (before the radiocarbon record was as good as it is now), “azilianization” came earlier in the north than in Iberia and indeed in Spain and Portugal there is a rather long period during which (in the local absence of harpoons) it is really impossible to assign one label (“Magdalenian”) or the other (“Azilian”) to many assemblages (as is the case, for example, in El Mirón [Straus and González Morales, this volume]). Indeed (and this is very clear in the Portuguese case described by Bicho et al.) it is possible to speak of “Epimagdalenian” lithic assemblages during the final centuries of the Last Glacial, such is the extent of cultural continuity in the south. There are a number of major topics of ongoing research on the Central European Magdalenian that are reflected in papers in this special issue. First, the systematic calibration of radiocarbon dates and the availability of the Greenland ice cores enable us better to understand the chronostratigraphic and climatic contexts of Magdalenian settlement. However, a re-evaluation of the pollen record from the Bølling type site has revealed problems with the reliable identification of the initial phase of the Late Glacial climatic
amelioration and dissatisfaction with the existing biostratigraphic framework has led to a new subdivision of the Late Glacial in Central Europe. Unfortunately, the new system is rather complicated and leads to confusions with the still widely used 1970s system of Mangerud in Western and Northern Europe. Because such confusion as to the “correct” biostratigraphic framework is also apparent in this volume, the correlation of archeological data with the ice core record has become an even more important issue. It is now well accepted that the Magdalenian colonization of Central Europe from the Paris Basin in the west to the uplands of southern Poland started long before Greenland Interstadial 1e (Debout et al.; Leesch et al.; Miller; Po1towicz-Bobak; Street et al., all in this volume). The earliest Magdalenian site in the “far northeast” is Maszycka Cave, which remains an isolated phenomenon (Koz1owski et al., this volume). This first signal of northern Magdalenian colonization seems to have been an episode dated shortly before the Heinrich 1 event. We presume that somewhat more favorable climatic conditions enabled animals such as mammoth, rhinoceros and saiga antelope to live on the steppe-tundra and in turn supported this early (temporary) Magdalenian expansion. But we should be cautious with the idea of colonization as a phenomenon in simple response to general climatic fluctuations reflected in the ice core record. The high-resolution archeological and environmental data from Switzerland (Leesch et al., this volume) suggest that the process should be viewed as being related to the regionally available, moisture-controlled vegetation cover and resultant large herbivore fauna, rather than to just temperature. At the same time, the nature of recolonization should be addressed more in terms of fluctuating human population density than as population pulses of pioneers followed by stabilized groups. The northern border of the Magdalenian territory and its relationship to the important Rhineland sites is an interesting test case for exploring the character of the Magdalenian expansion and land-use patterns (see Rensink; Street et al., both in this volume). However, the final push into then septentrional latitudes of England and northern Gemany and southernmost Scandinavia seems to have been closely related to the onset of Greenland Interstadia 1e, ca. 14,700 cal BP. The clear separation of the Magdalenian settlement in the uplands and the Hamburgian in the northern lowlands is still recognizable and there is little doubt that the Hamburgian and Creswellian (a.k.a. British Magdalenian) are rooted in the Magdalenian further south (Pettitt et al., this volume). Where faunal data are available, horse was the main prey of the Magdalenian hunters in the north, while the available data for the Hamburgian are actually relatively limited. The picture is still dominated by the evidence of many reindeer from the extraordinary sites of Meiendorf and Stellmoor in the Ahrensburg tunnel valley of NW Germany. There is increasing evidence in Central Europe for development toward what would become the Azilian/Federessergruppen during the later part of GI 1e. These groups, that hunted moose (Alces) and red deer (Cervus), were established in the early Allerød period (GI 1c3) (Leesch et al.; Street et al., both in this volume). Given this background, a problem still remains unsolved. From the radiocarbon dates, it seems that the Magdalenian groups hunting reindeer and horses in the Paris Basin persisted in Allerød, while Azilian groups hunting red deer and horses were established in the same region (Debout et al., this volume). However, this ecologically rather strange situation has not been confirmed by stratigraphic evidence, since none of the numerous northern sites has ever produced a layer with typical Magdalenian artifacts in superposition above an Azilian/Federmesser horizon. Some radiocarbon dates for Magdalenian sites in southern Poland also suggest continuation into Allerød (Po1towicz-Bobak, this volume). Further series of high-precision radiocarbon dates are necessary to address more reliably the timing of the transition to the Azilian and the relationship of the late Magdalenian in Central, Western and
Guest Editorial / Quaternary International 272-273 (2012) 1–5
Southwestern Europe. It is our hope that the papers in this volume contribute significantly to an understanding of the state of our knowledge of and questions in need of further research concerning this fascinating cultural phenomenon, the Magdalenian – an early version of the European Union. Albuquerque, Neuchâtel, and Greifswald May 10, 2012 Lawrence Straus* University of New Mexico, Anthropology, MSC01 1040, Albuquerque, NM 87131-001, United States
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Denise Leesch University of Neuchâtel, Laboratoire d’archéozoologie, Avenue de Bellevaux 51, CP 158, CH-2009 Neuchâtel, Switzerland Thomas Terberger Universität Greifswald, Germany * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (L. Straus) Available online 18 May 2012
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Quaternary International journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/quaint
Guest Editorial
The Magdalenian settlement of Europe: An introduction
1. The Magdalenian concept: archeological construct or dim reflection of a reality? Much (perhaps inordinate) attention has been paid in the last quarter-century to the Middle-Upper Paleolithic Transition, often as if the story of “modern” human adaptations had come fully to fruition by 30,000 years ago. However, more time separated the beginning of the Magdalenian from that “magic” date than separates us from the end of the Magdalenian, and there were vast climatic, vegetational, faunal and even geographic changes between “The Transition” and the Magdalenian and even within the Magdalenian time-frame itself – from cold, open conditions barely improved in Oldest Dryas vis-à-vis the Last Glacial Maximum at the beginning to more temperate, wooded ones during the Late Glacial Interstadial near its end. The Magdalenian of Western and North-Central Europe may represent the stereotypical Upper Paleolithic in terms of technology, subsistence, site and territorial organization, and artistic activity, but it was the result of: 1. a long history of cultural development–at first centered in SW Europe and then extended north- and eastward during the ca. 6000 year-duration of this cultural tradition – and 2. human responses to sharply fluctuating and regionally diverse environmental conditions, from Greenland Stadial 2 to Greenland Stadial 1. The Magdalenian is an old culture-historical unit, but it is our viewpoint that far from being a bankrupt, outmoded, arbitrary archeological construct, this creation of Gabriel de Mortillet is being reconstructed as defining an evolving network of human relations that spread out from SW France and Northern Spain as the human range expanded during the course of the Late Glacial, eventually connecting the Franco-Cantabrian homeland with daughter communities in territories as far north as Switzerland, the Low Countries, Germany, Moravia and Poland, as well as – more controversially – southern England. With a redefinition or reinterpretation of the notion of archeological culture, the concept of the Magdalenian is increasingly finding validity in the independent studies of lithic and other mineral raw materials, marine molluscs, fossils and other exotica, works of portable and rupestral art whose long-distance connections suggest material transport (direct procurement or, more importantly, down-the-line exchange) and/ or the diffusion of ideas embedded in widespread symbol systems. There has been a surprising convergence of conclusions in recent years coming from scholars (often of different paradigms – cultural historical or processual) working in various regions of Europe, from 1040-6182/$ – see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2012.05.022
the Basque Country to Maastricht, from the Rhineland to the Pyrenees, from Asturias to the Périgord, from Ile de France to Andalucía. The work of specialists, such as Gerhard Bosinski, Yvette Taborin, Meg Conkey, Jehanne Féblot-Augustins, Eelco Rensink, Marisol Corchón, Esteban Alvarez, Andoni Tarriño, and many others, in refocusing Magdalenian (and other Upper Paleolithic) research on networks of social relations is salient. In a first phase that lasted about a century, great synthesizers – de Mortillet, Breuil, Obermaier, Peyrony, Cheynier, de SonnevilleBordes – defined and refined ever-more-numerous temporal subdivisions of the Magdalenian, based mainly on lithic artifact types for the early phases and osseous ones for the late phases. Despite speculations about migrations and diffusions, the emphasis was generally on description and classification of diagnostic artifacts. While this archeological tradition did not end, Upper Paleolithic research clearly entered a new phase in the 1960s–70s, with parallel emphases on paleoenvironments, subsistence, settlement, mobility (i.e., adaptive behavior in ecological context). The ability to date Magdalenian levels by radiocarbon, independently of the supposedly temporally sensitive “fossil director” artifacts, allowed archeologists to focus their attention on artifact function and interactions with faunal remains, etc. In the wake of the discovery and (still-ongoing) excavation of the vast, Pompeii-like open-air site of Pincevent in the Paris Basin by André Leroi-Gourhan and his team, Magdalenian research became increasingly “horizontal” and not only vertical, as had been the case when deeply stratified caves and rockshelters completely dominated the record. 2. The Bern INQUA Congress symposium With the “boom” in new Magdalenian excavations and analyses (especially of paleoenvironmental proxy data and subsistence evidence) in the post-World War II period, the time was ripe by the end of the 1970s for new transnational syntheses. The first of these was a colloquium organized at the Université de Bordeaux by Denise de Sonneville-Bordes in 1977: “La Fin des Temps Glaciaires en Europe” (published in 1979). It was followed by “Le Magdalénien en Europe”, a UISPP colloquium in Mainz organized in 1987 by Jean-Philippe Rigaud (published in 1989), and “Le Peuplement Magdalénien”, a symposium held in 1988 at Chancelade for the centenary of the discovery of the Magdalenian skeleton of that name (published under the editorship of Rigaud, Henri Laville and Bernard Vandermeersch in 1992). Several other regional colloquia wholly or partly on the Magdalenian followed in such settings as Île de France, France as a whole, the Pyrenees, the North European
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Plain, Mediterranean Iberia, Cantabrian Spain, etc., all adding to the impressive corpus of modern-quality data on chronostratigraphy, paleoenvironments, technology, subsistence, art, etc. However, nearly a quarter-century has passed since the Mainz and Chancelade meetings, so, when Straus learned of Bern having been chosen for the INQUA Congress, he immediately thought of the extraordinary work of Denise Leesch and her team at the open-air sites of Champréveyres and Monruz on the shore of the Lac de Neuchâtel, as well as of the classic sites at Schaffhausen, and hence the important role of Switzerland in the story of the Magdalenian northward re-expansion. Switzerland is also well-known for the Magdalenian research of Prof. Hans-Georg Bandi, Prof. Michel Egloff, Prof. JeanMarie LeTensorer and others. Naturally Straus asked Denise Leesch to co-convene this symposium and we decided to include Thomas Terberger, especially so that the “new Magdalenian territories” of the North be well represented. Quite selfishly, Straus also asked Denise to organize an excursion to Neuchâtel and other Swiss Magdalenian sites en route. The first oral session and the poster session were held at the Bern Convention Center and the second oral session was held at the Archeological Institute–thanks to the graciousness of Ebbe Nielsen, himself a Magdalenian researcher in the University of Bern. We were particularly honored by the presence at various venues of the symposium of both Professor Bandi (himself a student of the great Hugo Obermaier) and his illustrious student, Prof. H.-J. Müller-Beck. The accumulation of new sites and analyses, the development of high-precision dating and correlation methods derived from AMS and Greenland ice cores, the growing numbers of collaborations among archeologists and between them and natural scientists – often transnational, as fomented by the European Union and programs such as Erasmus grants – all should justify the present volume as an admittedly incomplete but hopefully fairly representative sample of the active researchers on the Magdalenian and on Tardiglacial environments. While it has been impossible to be completely inclusive, we have assembled papers (based on most of the oral presentations and posters at the Bern INQUA Congress) representing research by teams from Portugal, Spain (both Mediterranean and Atlantic), southern and northern France, Belgium the Netherlands, England (the Creswellian being a late Magdalenian, now known to have participated in the tradition of cave art), Germany, Switzerland, and Poland. Having excavated Magdalenian sites in Cantabrian Spain, SW France, Belgium (and a bit of Epipaleolithic in Portugal), Straus has long been astonished by the great ecological range and great variation of territorial scale and mobility strategies of the Magdalenian oikumene, especially by late Dryas I and Bølling/Allerød times. Magdalenian people with large annual rounds may have hunted migratory reindeer and horses in Northern France or on the Great Plain south of the newly-formed Baltic Lake, but their contemporaries in the mountainous Iberian south depended on red deer and a variety of other less migratory ungulate game, as well as rabbits in Mediterranean Spain and southern Portugal, and, along the coasts, shellfish. In steep, rocky upland areas both in Spain and in montane areas of France, such as the Pyrenees and Alpine fringes, they hunted ibex and chamois. Humans in some territories, as in Cantabria and Aquitaine, made ample use of major salmon streams, while the Mediterranean shores of Andalucía (evidenced by Nerja Cave in Málaga) saw some exploitation of ocean fish (perhaps suggesting the presence of boats) and (beached?) seals. The range of vegetation types across time and space, varying with latitudes (36–54 N), altitudes and exposures, from Mediterranean pine and juniper open woods to Atlantic heath- and grasslands, to steppe-tundra in the north, with possible islands of thickets in local refugia, perhaps such as the Ardennes Plateau, and between the cold of Dryas I and the dramatic warming of the Late Glacial Interstadial (especially in the north) is similarly remarkable. What tied
this world together – this growing world inhabited by the descendants of the Solutrean survivors of the Last Glacial Maximum – was a dense network of social relations, made manifest by baubles from far-off lands (fossils, minerals, distinctive works of portable art), high-quality flints, striking similarities in rock art. In a world of considerable risk and danger, low population density and separated band territories, it makes eminent sense that, like foragers in the Arctic and deserts of southern Africa and Australia, Magdalenian people cultivated contacts with other groups as means of obtaining mates, information, and survival “insurance” (assurance of a nonhostile reception) in times of climatic crisis and resource scarcity, as well as valuable commodities. Trading partners, fictive kin, inlaws, the relations among people could have been direct (in the context of collective hunts, feasts, rituals at important “aggregation sites” such as caves with art “sanctuaries”) or indirect, via downthe-line trade in exotica from band to band, depending on the distances. The ultimate consequence was a Magdalenian world that gave coherence to an actual culture that stretched from Portugal to Poland, one that changed and included considerable variation in modi operandi, but had a reality in widely shared beliefs, symbols and values. Such was one of the first European Unions, like the Gravettian before it. This volume hopes to shed what light many current researchers across this broad stretch of regions can provide to understand the environments and strategies for survival that Magdalenian people practiced – material, social and ideological – in dealing with the great variety and frequent changes with which their late Ice Age world presented them across the millennia of this fascinating period not long in the timescale of human evolution before the dominion of hunting peoples began to yield to the spread of Neolithic farming. The authors include both seasoned fieldworkers with decades of excavation and basic analytical experience and younger scholars who cast fresh light on such important matters as lithic technology and subsistence. They reflect a wide diversity of viewpoints and perspectives that are the fruits of differing national schools or even paradigms of prehistoric archeology. These differences in turn also in part reflect the diverse natures of the Magdalenian archeological records of the various regions of Europe, notably the great divide between the (mainly calcareous) mountainous regions mostly in the south – SW France, Iberia – but also smaller “pockets” in the north (e.g., the Ardennes, Creswell Crags, the Moravian karst, the Swabian and Cracovian Juras) with cave and rockshelter sites (sometimes virtually exclusively, as in the case of Cantabrian Spain) versus the great plains dominated by open-air sites (e.g., northern France, western Switzerland, the loess plateau between Leuven, Maastricht and Aachen, the German Rhineland, eastern Germany). The kinds of archeology that one can do (study of long-term change through time but with palimpsest problems versus intra-site spatial activity analyses but sometimes with poor organic preservation) and thus the ways in which one can (however dimly) perceive the lives of Magdalenian peoples are significantly different and milieu-conditioned; the problems one believes can be addressed and possibly solved are often quite distinct. A cave archeologist in Spain works in a very different milieu from an openair site specialist in Germany. Yet there is something important that links them and that is what many of the papers in this volume seek to demonstrate – either overtly or indirectly. Magdalenian people lived in different worlds, ate different foods, occupied different kinds of sites, annual moved over greatly differing distances, knapped different kinds of stones, and had peculiar local traditions of decoration and “art”. But they were – like modern day archeologists – in contact with one another, sometimes face-to-face, mostly indirectly. Their oikumene was growing and the horizons of humans with some shared symbol systems and – presumably beliefs – were expanding throughout western Europe after humankind had weathered the LGM climatic crisis.
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In July 2011, having (more or less and hopefully) weathered the world economic crisis (and despite the great cost!), archeologists from many European countries and a couple of Americans convened in Bern to present their analytical results and interpretations of the Magdalenian, a 19th century archeological construct but a reality of hunting peoples on the ground arising from the Solutrean refugium population some 21 millennia BP in SW Europe. Much information of differing kinds is presented in the resultant papers published here, despite a few glaring gaps (e.g., Périgord, Czech Republic). Hopefully this tour d’horizon is respectably balanced in terms of geography, themes (from chronological to environmental to lithotechnological to faunal), theoretical perspectives and paradigms. The emphasis is heavily “Europeanist”, but with at least a few hints of the somewhat different “Americanist” point of view, perhaps more anthropological and less geological or historical, although these distinctions – so clear in the 1960s–80s – are increasingly becoming blurred, with greater contact (and even trans-Atlantic training), less domination of the field by just a few great men and women (usually French), more openness, frequent international publication, etc. The distances are being closed and this is particularly the case with the convergence on the study of social networks, come at by different European and American researchers from “hard scientific” (i.e., material sourcing), humanistic (i.e., art stylistic analysis), and social scientific (band relational analysis) perspectives. This new way of thinking about the Magdalenian signals the opening of a promising chapter in the long history of research into the “Reindeer (and Red Deer) Age”. Our one big regret is that the Bern experience was so costly that, aside from the excellent excursion to the Magdalenian sites and the Laténium (archeological) Museum in Neuchâtel, there was little opportunity for discussion, for a genuine sharing of views, an airing of differences, and exchange of hunches, ideas and suggestions. Another time, somehow, this must be organized. It is especially hard for American specialists to participate in the many regional, national, continental and thematic meetings and workshops on Upper Paleolithic that have proliferated in recent years throughout Europe. Indeed, other American researchers had been invited to Bern, but had to refuse due to lack of travel funds. Meanwhile, it is our hope that the papers that follow will both inform and stimulate debate and provoke much e-mail traffic, if not face-to-face contact, much like the Mediterranean shells that made it all the way up to the Neuwied Basin, from hand to hand, from band to band in Magdalenian times. 3. The subjects of papers in this volume The papers in the special issue of Quaternary International address a number of major questions concerning the Magdalenian record. A few focus specifically on associated faunas from both environmental and subsistence aspects (Cuenca et al., Drucker et al.); many others include such information as part of wider regional treatments, most notably Bicho et al. on Portugal with much new information on Late Glacial conditions in the extreme SW end of the Magdalenian range based on both oceanic and terrestrial proxy data. All grapple to varying degrees with the implications of the new chronological frameworks based on AMS dating with radiocarbon calibration and on the Greenland ice cores. Some papers, notably Roman and Villaverde, have a focus on osseous technology. Other papers have a least a partial, but distinct lithic technology focus (e.g., Domingo et al. on core scrapers) and taken as a whole they tend to point to the significant inter-regional differences that exist due to the bedrock (pun intended) facts of lithic raw material variability and differential access to “good” materials. R. Schwendler, building on her comprehensive Ph.D. dissertation, presents a few examples of long- and short-distance traces of social
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networks, hypothesizing the existence of differences between the Magdalenian societies in long-established “home” territories and those of the “frontier”. The themes of contacts, exchanges, movement and “style zones” within or cross-cutting ecological/subsistence provinces run through many of the papers. In the south, this is the key theme of the Utrilla et al. paper on the Ebro Valley as avenue of communication between the Mediterranean and Atlantic parts of the Magdalenian world from start to finish. One of the longstanding questions in Late Glacial research in SW Europe has been what followed the Solutrean phenomenon, when the transition happened, whether it was an in-situ, local process or an intrusive one. Several papers (e.g., Ducasse, Aura et al., Straus and González Morales, Utrilla et al.) address the problem of the Badegoulian or Initial Magdalenian (ex-Magdalenian 0). What is at issue is whether the so-called Badegoulian represented a first phase of the Magdalenian cultural tradition or a separate phenomenon, cut off by the “arrival” of the Magdalenian. First of all, the contrast between southern French, Mediterranean and Atlantic Spanish papers makes it apparent that: 1. The Badegoulian itself (even as defined by the significant presence of raclettes and/or transversal burins) may be quite variable, and not necessarily in a temporal trajectory. 2. Post-Solutrean flake-dominated assemblages are a separate matter, not necessarily associated with Badegoulian diagnostics (this clearly being the case in Cantabrian Spain). 3. There can be considerable continuity between Solutrean and Initial Magdalenian assemblages (as well as site locations and subsistence strategies), belying the theory of population or culture replacements. Indeed the notion of “desolutreanization” (gradual replacement – “battleship curve”-wise – of large, single-component foliate and stemmed projectile point tips by multi-component antler-cum-backed bladelet sagaies) best describes the process in some regions. Continuity in any event was the most likely scenario. Earlier theories of population replacement seem quite unlikely. 4. The end of the Solutrean came somewhat earlier in SW France than in Iberia (just as the Magdalenian seems to have ended earlier in the northern parts of its range than in the south – perhaps because subtle warming trends were more noticeable at the then-extreme end of the human range than in the always more “comfortable” southern homeland). 5. Assemblages with abundant local non-flint raw materials used to make “archaic” tool types (sidescrapers, notches, denticulates, splintered pieces/bipolar cores that may be found at the base of Magdalenian sequences (notably at El Mirón Cave in Cantabria) are not unique within the Upper Paleolithic context and may be the result of particular site functions and circumstantial catchment areas (foraging radii) that did not involve long-range movement or exchange, as opposed to these artifacts being time-space cultural “markers”. While some regions (e.g., Algarve, Portuguese Estremadura), though clearly within the general Magdalenian cultural sphere, were at peripheral extremes and witnessed the development of their own material peculiarities (including distinctive lithic artifacts types and scarcity of osseous artifacts, mobile or rock art) (see Bicho et al.), most attest – especially in the Middle and Upper Magdalenian – intensive inter-regional interaction, all the while maintaining distinctive local diets, settlement systems and technological and artistic localisms. The different styles of harpoons in the Cantabrian and Mediterranean regions are a good example (Roman and Villaverde this volume). The axes of human relations (emphasized by Utrilla et al.) can be traced in material remains – often not quantitatively abundant, but qualitatively eloquent. The classic example is
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the distribution of contours découpés (outline effigies of horse and other ungulate heads cut out of hyoid bones and generally perforated for attachment to necklaces or clothing) concentrated ca. 14 uncal. ka BP in the central and western French Pyrenees, but with a trail of scattered (or even sometimes cached, as in Tito Bustillo Cave, Asturias) examples that are either perfect examples of the genre or imperfect imitations, both to the east in Languedoc and especially to the west of the Middle Magdalenian super-site of Isturitz in the Spanish Basque Country, Cantabria and Asturias (see Schwendler, this volume). The trail of Upper Magdalenian black outline cave art figures is also clear, but then must ask why it is essentially a central-western Pyrenean and Vasco-Cantabrian pattern. We are on the verge of being able to reconstruct the territories and the routes of Magdalenian folk (maybe even mapped by them, if Utrilla et al. are right about their unusual find in Abauntz Cave, Navarra), and this includes the links between the southern homeland and the new territories to the north and in newly deglaciated and recolonized upland areas such as the Massif Central (see Angevin, this volume). Of course, one of the most important aspects of “the” Magdalenian is that it was a world of hunter bands who, when living on the northern fringes of the LGM refugium in France, began to extend their annual ranges and ultimately their territories into the Paris Basin, into the rather barren, lake-rich, recently deglaciated area of western Switzerland, into the valleys of the Ardennes, across the still-dry English Channel up to the Midlands, up to the loess plains of Flanders, Maastricht and Aachen, into the Rhineland, east to what is now the Czech Republic and southern Poland. Some of the northward pulses of human settlement, probably responses to some of the many minor climatic fluctuations in late Oldest Dryas (GS2a), came even before the dramatic upturn in climate of the Bølling Interstadial (GI 1e), the oldest and most curious of all those currently known being the spread of Middle Magdalenian (à navettes) people into Poland, though there had been even earlier pulses into Switzerland (e.g., Kastelhöhle-Nord) and Germany (e.g., Wiesbaden-Igstadt). These explorations (some failed), pioneering colonizations, and finally the establishment of human territories in the north that would even withstand the short, but dramatic cold crises within the Last Glacial Interstadial and especially Younger Dryas are the subjects of the papers on northern France, Switzerland, England, Belgium, SE Netherlands, Germany and Poland. During the process of reviewing the manuscripts that make up this volume, it became apparent that for northern Europeans it was difficult to accept that in the south there were still “Magdalenian” assemblages (with circular section harpoons at least in Cantabrian Spain) in the period between 12 and 11.5 uncal. ka BP; as Straus noted some time ago (before the radiocarbon record was as good as it is now), “azilianization” came earlier in the north than in Iberia and indeed in Spain and Portugal there is a rather long period during which (in the local absence of harpoons) it is really impossible to assign one label (“Magdalenian”) or the other (“Azilian”) to many assemblages (as is the case, for example, in El Mirón [Straus and González Morales, this volume]). Indeed (and this is very clear in the Portuguese case described by Bicho et al.) it is possible to speak of “Epimagdalenian” lithic assemblages during the final centuries of the Last Glacial, such is the extent of cultural continuity in the south. There are a number of major topics of ongoing research on the Central European Magdalenian that are reflected in papers in this special issue. First, the systematic calibration of radiocarbon dates and the availability of the Greenland ice cores enable us better to understand the chronostratigraphic and climatic contexts of Magdalenian settlement. However, a re-evaluation of the pollen record from the Bølling type site has revealed problems with the reliable identification of the initial phase of the Late Glacial climatic
amelioration and dissatisfaction with the existing biostratigraphic framework has led to a new subdivision of the Late Glacial in Central Europe. Unfortunately, the new system is rather complicated and leads to confusions with the still widely used 1970s system of Mangerud in Western and Northern Europe. Because such confusion as to the “correct” biostratigraphic framework is also apparent in this volume, the correlation of archeological data with the ice core record has become an even more important issue. It is now well accepted that the Magdalenian colonization of Central Europe from the Paris Basin in the west to the uplands of southern Poland started long before Greenland Interstadial 1e (Debout et al.; Leesch et al.; Miller; Po1towicz-Bobak; Street et al., all in this volume). The earliest Magdalenian site in the “far northeast” is Maszycka Cave, which remains an isolated phenomenon (Koz1owski et al., this volume). This first signal of northern Magdalenian colonization seems to have been an episode dated shortly before the Heinrich 1 event. We presume that somewhat more favorable climatic conditions enabled animals such as mammoth, rhinoceros and saiga antelope to live on the steppe-tundra and in turn supported this early (temporary) Magdalenian expansion. But we should be cautious with the idea of colonization as a phenomenon in simple response to general climatic fluctuations reflected in the ice core record. The high-resolution archeological and environmental data from Switzerland (Leesch et al., this volume) suggest that the process should be viewed as being related to the regionally available, moisture-controlled vegetation cover and resultant large herbivore fauna, rather than to just temperature. At the same time, the nature of recolonization should be addressed more in terms of fluctuating human population density than as population pulses of pioneers followed by stabilized groups. The northern border of the Magdalenian territory and its relationship to the important Rhineland sites is an interesting test case for exploring the character of the Magdalenian expansion and land-use patterns (see Rensink; Street et al., both in this volume). However, the final push into then septentrional latitudes of England and northern Gemany and southernmost Scandinavia seems to have been closely related to the onset of Greenland Interstadia 1e, ca. 14,700 cal BP. The clear separation of the Magdalenian settlement in the uplands and the Hamburgian in the northern lowlands is still recognizable and there is little doubt that the Hamburgian and Creswellian (a.k.a. British Magdalenian) are rooted in the Magdalenian further south (Pettitt et al., this volume). Where faunal data are available, horse was the main prey of the Magdalenian hunters in the north, while the available data for the Hamburgian are actually relatively limited. The picture is still dominated by the evidence of many reindeer from the extraordinary sites of Meiendorf and Stellmoor in the Ahrensburg tunnel valley of NW Germany. There is increasing evidence in Central Europe for development toward what would become the Azilian/Federessergruppen during the later part of GI 1e. These groups, that hunted moose (Alces) and red deer (Cervus), were established in the early Allerød period (GI 1c3) (Leesch et al.; Street et al., both in this volume). Given this background, a problem still remains unsolved. From the radiocarbon dates, it seems that the Magdalenian groups hunting reindeer and horses in the Paris Basin persisted in Allerød, while Azilian groups hunting red deer and horses were established in the same region (Debout et al., this volume). However, this ecologically rather strange situation has not been confirmed by stratigraphic evidence, since none of the numerous northern sites has ever produced a layer with typical Magdalenian artifacts in superposition above an Azilian/Federmesser horizon. Some radiocarbon dates for Magdalenian sites in southern Poland also suggest continuation into Allerød (Po1towicz-Bobak, this volume). Further series of high-precision radiocarbon dates are necessary to address more reliably the timing of the transition to the Azilian and the relationship of the late Magdalenian in Central, Western and
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Southwestern Europe. It is our hope that the papers in this volume contribute significantly to an understanding of the state of our knowledge of and questions in need of further research concerning this fascinating cultural phenomenon, the Magdalenian – an early version of the European Union. Albuquerque, Neuchâtel, and Greifswald May 10, 2012 Lawrence Straus* University of New Mexico, Anthropology, MSC01 1040, Albuquerque, NM 87131-001, United States
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Denise Leesch University of Neuchâtel, Laboratoire d’archéozoologie, Avenue de Bellevaux 51, CP 158, CH-2009 Neuchâtel, Switzerland Thomas Terberger Universität Greifswald, Germany * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (L. Straus) Available online 18 May 2012