The British Late Middle Palaeolithic: an Interpretative Synthesis of Neanderthal Occupation at the Northwestern Edge of the Pleistocene World
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This is a repository copy of The British Late Middle Palaeolithic: An interpretative synthesis of Neanderthal occupation at the northwestern edge of the Pleistocene World. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/152474/ Version: Accepted Version Article: White, M.J. and Pettitt, P.B. (2011) The British Late Middle Palaeolithic: An interpretative synthesis of Neanderthal occupation at the northwestern edge of the Pleistocene World. Journal of World Prehistory, 24 (1). pp. 25-97. ISSN 0892-7537 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10963-011-9043-9 This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Journal of World Prehistory. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10963-011-9043-9. Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ The British Late Middle Palaeolithic: an interpretative synthesis of Neanderthal occupation at the northwestern edge of the Pleistocene World Mark J. White* & Paul B. Pettitt** * Department of Archaeology, Durham University, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK. [email protected] ** Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield, Northgate House, West Street, Sheffield, S1 4ET, UK. [email protected] Abstract The British Middle Palaeolithic is divided into two discrete periods of occupation: the Early Middle Palaeolithic (MIS 9 to 7, ~330–180 ka BP) and the Late Middle Palaeolithic (MIS 3, ~59–36 ka BP), separated by a long hiatus. Owing to the relative poverty of the record and historical difficulties in dating and correlating archaeological sites, the British Late Middle Palaeolithic has, until recently, received scant attention, and has largely been regarded as the poor man of Europe, especially by British archaeologists. Indeed, there has been more discussion of the absence of humans from Britain than of what they did when they were present. We aim here to redress that situation. Following from recent considerations of the Early Middle Palaeolithic (White et al. 2006; Scott 2010), we offer an interpretative synthesis of the British Late Middle Palaeolithic, situating ‘British’ Neanderthals in their chronological, environmental and landscape contexts. We discuss the character of the British record, and offer an account of Neanderthal behaviour, settlement systems and technological practices at the northwestern edge of their known Upper Pleistocene range. We also examine the relationship of the enigmatic Early Upper Palaeolithic leafpoint assemblages to Neanderthals is also examined. Introduction For much of the Late Pleistocene, reduced sea-levels (resulting from increased global ice volume) exposed the currently submerged basins surrounding Britain, leaving it connected to Europe via dry plains – often referred to as ‘Doggerland’ (Coles 1998) – stretching across what is now the North Sea, and steep river valleys in the English Channel. Prior to the arrival of modern humans ~35 (14C) ka BP, Britain thus formed 1 the westernmost terrestrial extension of the Neanderthal World, which stretched at its maximum extent across Europe south of the Baltic, throughout the Levant, and as far east as Tajikistan. Evidence of Neanderthal occupation is not evenly distributed across this area, with records from southeast European and former Soviet regions being rather sparse, especially when compared to the archaeologically rich sequences from Spain, Italy, Belgium, Israel, and, most famously, southwest France. Although to an extent presumably a reflection of the uneven and fluctuating distribution of Neanderthal groups in space and time, this pattern is generally understood to be the result of unequal research histories, and untold riches and spectacular surprises undoubtedly await discovery – as shown, for example, by the recent claims of a new human species, the Denisovans, in Siberia (Reich et al. 2010). Such promise is probably not the case for Britain, however. Despite a long and intensive history of archaeological investigation, spanning almost 200 years, the record of Neanderthal occupation of Britain remains remarkably slight in Eurasian terms. Even when one takes into account Gamble’s (1999, p. 204) continental-scale observation that despite much larger-sized excavations, sites in northern Europe tend to produce smaller and fewer assemblages than those in the southern/Mediterranean zone (the result of differing intensities of long-term occupation), Britain fails to match up to its nearest neighbours. It lacks deep multi-layered cave sequences, while open air occurrences are scarce and comprise very few or even singular artefacts. The records of earlier researchers such as William Boyd Dawkins and William Pengelly, who in the 19th century excavated what became relatively major sites, seem to suggest that the lithic assemblages were of no more than a thousand or so items, probably far fewer. This has led many specialists to argue that, at most, Britain was host to low-density, intermittent Neanderthal settlement during the Late Middle Palaeolithic (Roe 1981; Wymer 1988; Currant and Jacobi 2001, 2002; Ashton 2002; White and Jacobi 2002). Figure 1 summarizes the climate, marine isotope stages (MIS), age ranges, mammalian biostratigraphy, archaeological periods and patterns of human settlement for the entire Middle Palaeolithic of Britain. The principal subject of this paper – the Late Middle Palaeolithic (as defined by White and Jacobi 2002) – represents a period of Neanderthal occupation during MIS 3 ( 59–24 ky BP) that is separated from the 2 Early Middle Palaeolithic on the basis of technology and typology as well as chronology (White and Jacobi 2002; White et al. 2006). The Late Middle Palaeolithic broadly correlates with the Pin Hole Mammalian Assemblage Zone (MAZ) of Currant and Jacobi (1997; 2001; 2010), and in most cases an attribution of assemblages to this archaeological period is dependent on an association with the highly characteristic faunal taxa that comprise this MAZ. No evidence of human occupation has been found associated with any other formally defined Late Pleistocene MAZ, and nor do any cogent absolutely dated archaeological sites exist between the end of MIS7 (the British Early Middle Palaeolithic) and the end of MIS4 (Ashton 2001; Lewis et al. 2010), suggesting a complete absence of human occupation until the arrival of late Neanderthals within MIS3. While absence of evidence is never evidence of absence, this pattern has yet to be convincingly challenged (e.g. Wenban Smith et al. 2010). Insert Figure 1 around here The evidence that does exist for the British Late Middle Palaeolithic is poorly understood and rarely integrated into broader (i.e. continental) interpretative frameworks. The reasons for this are many and varied. Part of the issue lies in biases created by the history of excavation and curation. Many sites – including major ones such as Kent’s Cavern and the caves of Creswell Crags – were investigated and practically cleaned out during the 19th and early 20th centuries, using basic methods and often in less than ideal circumstances. Implementiferous (tool rich) deposits at several key sites have now all but disappeared, and their collections have been widely dispersed and/or lost. Describing early excavations at Wookey Hole, Dawkins (1862, p. 116) noted that ‘...the greater proportion [of finds] were either thrown away or scattered among the private collections of the neighbourhood’, a phrase that could be used for almost all British Middle Palaeolithic collections. The publications and archival records that exist are almost always cursory, and aimed at historical questions no longer of pressing concern, and their testimonies are therefore often of limited value to modern Palaeolithic archaeology. Moreover, while several influential workers of the 19th and 20th centuries (for example Hinton and Kennard 1905; Moir 1926; Dewey and Smith 1925; King and Oakley 1936) tried to adopt the various Palaeolithic frameworks emerging from Europe (e.g. those of de Mortillet 1869, Commont 1912 and Breuil 1932), by fault or design their use and interpretation of 3 these frameworks is idiosyncratic, imparting a particularly insular flavour to British scholarship. It is therefore perhaps no surprise that the British Late Middle Palaeolithic record has played little role in answering fine-grained culture-historical or behavioural questions, and has yet to feature widely in the discussions of Neanderthal extinction, the initial Eurasian dispersal of Homo sapiens, and the apparently concomitant Middle-to-Upper Palaeolithic transition that have dominated the younger end of palaeoanthropological research for the past two decades (e.g. Jöris and Adler 2008; Jöris and Street 2008 and references therein). Although such debates have ‘opened up’ geographically over the last several years, much argument is still focused on the record of