"Hugging the glaciers"

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

All,

From the abstract alone, here is an interesting paper that adds much to the notion that "glacial edge" environments were likely to have been more biologically productive (and attractive to humans) than a number of people who call themselves "geoarchaeologists" would like us to believe.

Jacques Cinq-Mars

Barton, R. N. E., R. M. Jacobi, D. Stapert, and M. J. Street. 2003. The Late-glacial reoccupation of the British Isles and the Creswellian. Journal of Quaternary Science 18(7): 631 – 643.

Abstract:

This paper presents a review of AMS radiocarbon dating evidence for human occupation of Britain during the Late-glacial Interstadial. The dates are all on humanly modified materials, including artefacts, and on human bone. The CalPal program is used to test whether the earliest evidence of human presence shows any correlation with more widespread climatic events, and if the British chronology differs significantly from that of neighbouring regions of northwest Europe. In the second part of the paper a number of well-dated sites with British Late Upper Palaeolithic Creswellian technology are examined and compared with lithic assemblages from The Netherlands and Belgium. The main conclusions of this work are that expansion of human populations into the northern edge of the upland zone just before or at the beginning of GI-1 was followed by repopulation of the British Isles possibly with very little time-lag. The British Creswellian sites offer evidence of this earliest resettlement, which is mainly focused on the upland margins of western and central Britain.

Keywords:
Creswellian • Late Upper Palaeolithic • Late-glacial Interstadial • AMS radiocarbon chronology • Greenland Interstadial I

Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

If you can afford it, the full article can read HERE.

[Daryl Habel]

Outside my affordability, the Journal of Quaternary Science; however, the "news" accompanying the Barton et al.  paper describing the Creswellian re-occupation can be obtained from the National Geographic website:

A quote:

"The big question has always been how quickly, and in what number, did people return once the glaciers had retreated," said research team leader Nick Barton, from the anthropology department of Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, England. "Now with the benefit of larger numbers of radiocarbon dates corrected against a highly accurate record of global climatic change from the Greenland ice record, it seems reoccupation was an almost instantaneous event across northern and central Europe."

For the full story:

CLICK HERE FOR THE URL,

Enjoy,
Dar

[lagarvelho]

Dar:

I clicked on the URL.  It didn't work.  Oh well.
Anne G

[Daryl Habel]

The problem appears to be yours. I verified and the URL does work.

Try again,
Dar

[Mikey Brass]

The problem appears to be yours. I verified and the URL does work.

Try again,
Dar

I won't have access to the article until Monday. It is a decent summary, based on initial impressions, but perhaps could have been better if they have briefly provided a range of temperatures. They say wild horses but also Artic hares, so that sounding to me as if there were substantial seasonal temperature variations.

[lagarvelho]

This is for Dar:

It worked this time.  Goody!(It was quite interesting, tooi).
Anne G

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

I won't have access to the article until Monday. It is a decent summary, based on initial impressions, but perhaps could have been better if they have briefly provided a range of temperatures. They say wild horses but also Artic hares, so that sounding to me as if there were substantial seasonal temperature variations.

From what little I have read, I think that the most important contributions of this study will be:

(a) that, indeed, in many areas of the world the very complex and dynamic process of deglaciation was (is) conducive to the formation of highly productive  environments extending over vast regions; and,

(b) that such environments were very rapidly exploited by nearby hunting-gathering groups which, having a lenghty and intimate knowledge of such phenomena or changes, knew a good place when they saw one; ergo, the title of my initial post.

The rapidity with which human groups reoccupy and exploit such recently deglaciated zones has already been well documented in northern North America (at the end of the Upper Pleniglacial, or Late Wisconsinan) and, in the present case, is finally being demonstrated in a (westernmost) Eurasian context. The same is likely to have happened all the way to eastern Beringia (see below).

Regarding the "substantial seasonal temperature variations", it goes without saying that such would have manifested themselves along the "deglaciating" margins.  However, one should be careful not to assume that modern environments (i.e., present faunal communities)  can be viewed as necessarily analogous to what was going on during the Late Pleistocene. Many studies, from North America, for example,  indicate that vegetational and faunal communities were not arranged according to the latitudinal/zonal patterns that formed during the Holocene. In other words, the meaning of the association of "wild horses" / "Arctic hares" should certainly not be interpreted through our Holocene climatologic glasses.

In this regard, the Bluefish Caves complex – an area I know rather well, in easternmost Beringia –- has yielded faunal remains that date between about 30,000 and 10,000 kya, straddling (perhaps) the end of the last interstadial, the Late Pleniglacial (Late Wisconsinan) and and its slow demise.  Various elements from this very rich fauna clearly shows that over a period of at least 20,000 years, there were very curious combinations of animals (i.e., communities) including Mammuthus, Bison priscus, Rangifer tarandus, Equus lambei, Cervus elaphus, Ovis dalli, Alopex lagopus, Vulpes vulpes, Lepus arcticus and Lepus americanus, etc. Not to mention Homo! Even excluding the now extinct animals, it was, as I said, a very curious combination/mosaic relative to the present zonal arrangements, and particularly one in which the presence of this or that animal cannot necessarily be used as a clear indicator of actual climate.

Enough for now.

Jacques Cinq-Mars

[Mikey Brass]

From what little I have read, I think that the most important contributions of this study will be:

(a) that, indeed, in many areas of the world the very complex and dynamic process of deglaciation was (is) conducive to the formation of highly productive  environments extending over vast regions; and,

The notification of your post carrived while I was at uni and reminded me to download the paper. It's 13 pages and I think I'll quote the conclusion here for those who do not have access to the study:

Concluding discussion
To conclude, we would fully endorse the interpretation of the
Creswellian as a regional facies of the Late Magdalenian, as
originally proposed by Garrod over 75 years ago. The main focus of its distribution appears to have been in the upland
margins of western and central Britain but with significant outlying
occurrences in The Netherlands and possibly Belgium. If
we are correct in assuming this distribution is linked to
topographical landscape factors, we would expect further findspots
of this type to come to light in due course in similar
upland and upland margin zones of the northwest European
mainland.
We have made the case in this paper that the Creswellian
can be defined according to a relatively tightly defined set of
typological and technological criteria (Table 1). We do not
claim that the Creswellian can be classified on single artefact
types although we suggest that if there is one defining feature
of this grouping it is the distinctive bi-truncated Cheddar point
rather than the single-truncated Creswell point. We acknowledge
that some of the identification categories are less helpful
than others and should not necessarily be considered in isolation.
For instance the en e´peron preparation on blade butts is a
characteristic also found in some Late-glacial Hamburgian collections
(Hartz, 1987) and more commonly in the Late Magdalenian
(Karlin, 1972). Its apparent absence in the Dutch
collections, tentatively assigned by us to the Creswellian, is
interesting and might signal the potentially younger chronological
position of these assemblages in relation to the British
sites.
How significant were the differences in the Late-glacial lithic
point types? Ought we to be surprised by the variation in
backed tools occupying the same time range and within a
relatively restricted geographical area (Cheddar points in Britain
versus backed bladelets in France)? The first question finds
some answer in functional studies, which indicate a convergence
in the use of such artefacts as components of projectiles.
In the Late Magdalenian the application of backed and
unbacked bladelets as insets in antler tipped weaponheads
has long been known (Leroi-Gourhan, 1983). However, the
use of Cheddar points in a similar manner has been verified
only very recently on the basis of wear studies undertaken on
the points from the Dutch site of Zeijen (Rots et al., 2002) and
by observations made by one of us (RMJ) on the Cheddar points
from Gough’s Cave, Somerset, which also show macroscopic
fractures best interpreted as impact damage. The fact that point
shapes may vary over relatively short distances should also perhaps
not be altogether surprising but it casts some potentially
interesting light on the social behaviour of human communities
in the Late-glacial. For example, in an ethnographic context the
existence of distinctive point types has been shown to contain
special symbolic meaning, carrying information about the existence
or proximity of social groups and boundaries (Wiessner,
1983). Thus the occurrence of Cheddar points may be an indicator
of separate group identity (cf. Charles, 1999), as would be
expected if populations were becoming geographically isolated
and on the periphery of the Magdalenian ‘core area’
(Jacobi, 1988, pp. 432–433). We do not feel this is contradicted
by similarities in other aspects of the Creswellian and
Magdalenian tool-kit such as the bone and antler equipment.
In terms of the overall relationship between groupings of the
Late Upper Palaeolithic, we hypothesise that once the Magdalenian
was established along the western margins of the northwestern
European uplands (including the Paris Basin), it would
only be a matter of time (maybe to be measured in decades)
before the existence of further equivalent upland/ecotonal
environments to the northwest became known. Although separated
from the Magdalenian ‘core area’ by 300–400km of a
lowland landscape, the British peninsula could have been
reached across the existing landbridge within a matter of
weeks. Whether this most marginal area conducive to Upper
Palaeolithic subsistence remained in contact with, and part
of, the Magdalenian development to the south and east is an
open question. Some elements might represent continuation
of received technologies or even continued contact to the core
area, for example in shared antler and ivory tool forms. Idiosyncracies
in the Creswellian lithic technology such as the adoption
of Cheddar points or the loss of backed bladelets might
plausibly suggest isolation, but this must be balanced by the
observation that many developments also occurred widely
across the late Magdalenian world, e.g. the appearance of single
truncated lithic points, the equivalent of Creswell points,
and could also represent local additions to an essentially
Magdalenian technology.
Finally, an increased data base of radiocarbon dates and
their comparison as calibrated ages against GISP2 lead us to
disagree with the pattern of ‘pioneer’ and ‘residential’ phases
originally envisaged by Housley et al. (1997). It is indeed in
almost all cases still possible to recognise a weak signal (single
or very few dates) for Magdalenian (and Creswellian/Hamburgian)
presence prior to the bulk of the absolute dating evidence
for occupation of a given region. However, in many cases the
oldest dates are from the same archaeological context as the
larger number of younger dates and it must be questioned
whether they simply reflect statistical outliers. Instead, we
would put forward for future testing two linked propositions
that (i) the synchronous appearance of the Magdalenian across
most of the western central European uplands, and the clear
coincidence of this with rising [delta]18O values in the Greenland
ice, suggests that immigration into this region was precipitated
by climatic change, leading to greater biotic productivity and
the rapid transformation of the previously unattractive landscape
into a viable habitat for large mammals and their human
predators, and that (ii) the occupation by Magdalenian-related groups (Creswellian, Hamburgian) of the northwestern and
northern lowland zone was in response to the even greater
environmental changes initiated by Greenland Interstadial 1.