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A Hunter-Gatherer Landscape Southwest Germany in the Late Paleolithic and Mesolithic INTERDISCIPLINARY CONTRIBUTIONS TO ARCHAEOLOGY Series Editor: Michael A. Jochim, University of California, Santa Barbara Founding Editor: Roy S. Dickens, Jr., Late of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Current Volumes in This Series: THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF WEALTH Consumer Behavior in English America James G. Gibb CASE STUDIES IN ENVIRONMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY Edited by Elizabeth J. Reitz, Lee A. Newsom, and Sylvia J . Scudder DARWINIAN ARCHAEOLOGIES Edited by Herbert Donald Graham Maschner HUMANS AT THE END OF THE ICE AGE The Archaeology of the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition Edited by Lawrence Guy Straus, Berit Valentin Eriksen, Jon M. Erlandson, and David R. Yesner A HUNTER-GATHERER LANDSCAPE Southwest Germany in the Late Paleolithic and Mesolithic Michael A. Jochim HUNTERS BETWEEN EAST AND WEST The Paleolithic of Moravia Jift Svoboda, Vojen Lozek, and Emanuel Vlcek MISSISSIPPIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY Jon Muller PROJECTILE TECHNOLOGY Edited by Heidi Knecht STATISTICS FOR ARCHAEOLOGISTS A Commonsense Approach Robert D. Drennan STONE TOOLS Theoretical InSights into Human Prehistory Edited by George H. Odell VILLAGERS OF THE MAROS A Portrait of an Early Bronze Age Society John M. O'Shea A Chronological Listing of Volumes in this series appears at the back of this volume. A Continuation Order Plan is available for this series. A continuation order will bring delivery of each new volume immediately upon publication. Volumes are billed only upon actual shipment. For further information please contact the publisher. A Hunter-Gatherer Landscape Southwest Germany in the Late Paleolithic and Mesolithic MICHAEL A. JOCHIM University of California Santa Barbara, California SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, LLC Library of Congress Cataloglng-In-Publlcatlon Data Jochim. Michael A. A hunter-gatherer landscape : southwest Germany in the late Paleolithic and Mesolithic I Michael A. Jochim. p. cm. -- (Interdisciplinary contributions to archaeologyl Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-306-45741-8 ISBN 978-1-4419-8664-1 (eBook) (pbk. l DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-8664-1 1. Paleolithic perlod--Germany. 2. Mesolithic period--Germany. 3. Hunting and gathering socleties--Germany. 4. Excavations (Archaeologyl--Germany. 5. Germany--Antiquities. I. Title. I!. Series. GN772.22.G4J63 1998 936.3--dc21 98-22734 CIP ISBN 978-0-306-45741-8 © 1998 Springer Science+Business Media New York Originally published by Plenum Press, New York in 1998 http://www.plenum.com 1098 76 54 3 2 1 All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher Foreword As an archaeologist with primary research and training experience in North American arid lands, I have always found the European Stone Age remote and impenetrable. My initial introduction, during a survey course on world prehis­ tory, established that (for me, at least) it consisted of more cultures, dates, and named tool types than any undergraduate ought to have to remember. I did not know much, but I knew there were better things I could be doing on a Saturday night. In any event, after that I never seriously entertained any notion of pur­ suing research on Stone Age Europe-that course was enough for me. That's a pity, too, because Paleolithic Europe-especially in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene-was the scene of revolutionary human adaptive change. Iron­ ically, all of it was amenable to investigation using precisely the same models and analytical tools I ended up spending the better part of two decades applying in the Great Basin of western North America. Back then, of course, few were thinking about the late Paleolithic or Me­ solithic in such terms. Typology, classification, and chronology were the order of the day, as the text for my undergraduate course reflected. Jochim evidently bridled less than I at the task of mastering these chronotaxonomic mysteries, yet he was keenly aware of their limitations-in particular, their silence on how individual assemblages might be connected as part of larger regional subsis­ tence-settlement systems. As he points out, ground-breaking work was being done on this problem in North America at the time, initially by my colleague the late Howard D. Winters, followed shortly by another close colleague of mine, David Hurst Thomas. Winters, for instance, was likely the first to argue that compositionally distinct archaeological assemblages might represent the various functional poses of a single regional system, and not different cultural or ethnic entities as was commonly assumed by old-school taxonomists. Tho- v vi FOREWORD mas, on the other hand, essentially bypassed assemblages altogether and worked with the relative density and dispersion of individual artifact categories across different environmental zones. Unfortunately, little of what they did was directly relevant to the regional analysis of the European-more specifically, southern German-Mesolithic assemblages that intrigued Jochim. Both Win­ ters and Thomas developed their research around models that drew heavily on North American ethnography, which were of little use to Jochim who lacked reasonable analogs for the Mesolithic. Accordingly, he set about devising what was perhaps the first general model of hunter-gatherer subsistence and settle­ ment behavior. The reader who has never read Jochim's Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence and Settlement: A Predictive Model is strongly advised to do so. Its basic proposition, now largely taken for granted, was startlingly radical at the time. Jochim main­ tained that one could predictively model subsistence, settlement, and popula­ tion size for hunter-gatherers entirely on the basis of the characteristics of their resources (e.g., mobility, size, etc.). Hunter-gatherer specialists, of course, had been acting for some time as though they could do this. Steward's culture-eco­ logical model of the Great Basin, for example, had argued that ethnographic Shoshonean subsistence, settlement, population, and even social organization were altogether understandable given Shoshonean resources and technology. He clearly intended this to be read as meaning (at least in some sense) that these were the behaviors one would expect-which is to say, predict-given only information about Great Basin resources and Shoshonean technology. What Steward and others did not provide were the quantitative predictive algo­ rithms that would allow one to check their predictive abilities independently. Until Jochim, it was enough, upon completing such an analysis, simply to as­ sert that this or that ethnographic pattern could have been predicted given knowledge of the technoenvironmental context, i.e., without peeking, so to speak, at the ethnographic data beforehand. Jochim decided to see if that were so. The analysis that followed was am­ bitious and-because he chose not to follow the lead of evolutionary ecology­ dauntingly complex. It required that specific subsistence resources, say boar and moose, be characterized with respect to a common set of quantitative vari­ ables that captured the goals and constraints that were presumed to determine hunter-gatherer subsistence, which, in tum, were said to determine settlement location and population size. Resources emerged not as distinct taxa but as strings of costs and benefits (e.g., weight, density, aggregation, and mobility). These costs and benefits were then manipulated by precise algorithms to as­ certain optimal resource mixtures, settlement locations, and population sizes for the Mesolithic in the Upper Danube of southwestern Germany. These ex­ pectations, in turn, were compared with the archaeological evidence then available. The correspondence was close enough to suggest that the model cap- FOREWORD vii tured at least some of the variables that had shaped Mesolithic subsistence and settlement. The match, unfortunately, was far from perfect-too weak, as it turned out, to justify all of the simplifying assumptions one had to make for sake of expedience along the way. Perhaps more than anything else, this and similar predictive exercises, including my own, revealed how shockingly crude and simplistic one had to be in order even to attempt quantitative prediction of the archaeological record from heuristic behavioral models. Just modeling subsis­ tence and settlement behavior proved so difficult. for instance, that we ignored almost altogether the taphonomic and formation processes that directly shaped their archaeological expression. To make a long story short, this form of predictive model turned out not to be the wave of the archaeological future. Nevertheless, clumsy as they were, these models-especially the one Jochim developed for the Mesolithic of southwestern Germany-radically transformed archaeological thinking about human behavior, hunter-gatherer behavior in particular. They established the contemporary analytical framework cast in terms of costs, benefits, currencies, strategies, and decision rules. And they had one additional advantage: because their predictions were precise, they could be-in fact, had to be-tested on the ground. They forced archaeologists preoccupied with heuristic theories of be­ havior to survey and excavate and, in so dOing, to find better ways of connect­ ing abstract theoretical concepts with real archaeological data. The

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