Middle Palaeolithic at Veldwezelt-Hezerwater, Belgium

[Daryl Habel]

While googling for information on the "blade-dominated" Middle Paleolithic sites of Northwestern Europe, I've come across a very illuminating "Public Defence of the PhD Thesis by Patrick M.M.A. Bringmans", dated June 1, 2006, and bearing the (English language) title "Multiple Middle Palaeolithic Occupations in a Loess-soil Sequence at Veldwezelt-Hezerwater, Limburg, Belgium".

My google search first led me to a pdf for Chapter 7 of this thesis, which has the sub-title "Inter-Assemblage Comparisons", and contained much valuable information in the form of short summary descriptions of a very large number of Northwestern European Middle Palaeolithic sites, a few, such as Trou Magrite and Salzgitter-Lebenstedt which are well-known, but many others which rarely ever are mentioned (and, of course, the "blady" MP assemblages).

But Chapter 7 didn't have much information on the Veldwezelt-Hezerwater site, nor the author and reference for this chapter, so I google-searched the site name and came up with the source itself.  It turns out the entire PhD thesis is available free in pdf segments from (scroll to bottom of page):
CLICK HERE

Some of these segments are quite large, on the order of 12000-18000 kb (12-18 Mb), so I haven't worked my way through the entire thesis, but a glance at the segment titled "Dedication Colophon Contents Acknowledgements.pdf" (only 263 kb) should be adequate to inform you whether you are interested in this or not.

So far (in addition to Chapter 7), I've downloaded the segment containing "Chapter 1 2 3 Introduction Context & 24 Loci.pdf", and this segment proved so informative on many levels (general issues of paleoclimate reconstruction, raw materials, core reduction techniques, and artifact taxonomy), that I'll probably follow through with the remainder of the thesis (just to see what Veldwezelt-Hezerwater is all about).  This segment itself is a valuable resource for beginners in the study of  archaeological site descriptions, and can stand by itself.  I recommend this section, even though the pdf size is an intermediate  14476 kb (correction: make that a hefty 15 Mb).

This thesis probably isn't the cat's meow for everyone, but I'm finding it very interesting, so I thought I'd share it here.

Dar

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

While googling for information on the "blade-dominated" Middle Paleolithic sites of Northwestern Europe, I've come across a very illuminating "Public Defence of the PhD Thesis by Patrick M.M.A. Bringmans", dated June 1, 2006, and bearing the (English language) title "Multiple Middle Palaeolithic Occupations in a Loess-soil Sequence at Veldwezelt-Hezerwater, Limburg, Belgium".

<snip>

Dar,

Great of you for picking this up and sharing it with us. Thanks. It is certainly my “cat's meow”. As you know, I love stones! I have already downloaded it all and consolidated all the individual PDFs into a single document  which “weighs” about 67 MB.

It all brings back sweet memories from an earlier life when intellectual exchanges and trading were a bit more lively and balanced than they are today, and when we had an exchange on this topic which involded the participation of one Greg Laden who, unfortunately, has long ago decided to pull a disappearing act on us.

At any rate, I’ll now need to find the time to nibble through it all!

Jacques

[Daryl Habel]

At any rate, I’ll now need to find the time to nibble through it all!
Jacques

Jacques,
I thought you might like it.

I also noticed that Bringmans has a webpage devoted to Veldwezelt-Hezerwater at: CLICK HERE.  This is just a title page, but by clicking on "This is Veldwezelt-Hezerwater" the hyperlink takes you to another page offering a choice of Dutch and English language versions.  The English language version is HERE and you will notice the column on the left-hand side of the page offers links to a multitude of nice pages, richly illustrated in color diagrams and photographs.  For people who have problems with large file sizes, this is a decent alternative.

Actually, its a nice addition to the PhD thesis.

Dar

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

At any rate, I’ll now need to find the time to nibble through it all!
Jacques

Jacques,
I thought you might like it.

I also noticed that Bringmans has a webpage devoted to Veldwezelt-Hezerwater at: CLICK HERE.  This is just a title page, but by clicking on "This is Veldwezelt-Hezerwater" the hyperlink takes you to another page offering a choice of Dutch and English language versions.  The English language version is HERE and you will notice the column on the left-hand side of the page offers links to a multitude of nice pages, richly illustrated in color diagrams and photographs.  For people who have problems with large file sizes, this is a decent alternative.

Actually, its a nice addition to the PhD thesis.

Dar

A very nice complement indeed. Thanks for digging further into this. May I suggest that this particular site (URL) be switched over to the LINKS board?

Jacques

[Daryl Habel]

May I suggest that this particular site (URL) be switched over to the LINKS board?
Jacques

That's all right with me.  Move it whenever you want.

[Robert Henvell]

IDownloaded chapter 8,which provides a good summary.This was adequate for the scribe and possibly some other individuals?