Session: #380

Theme & Session Format

Theme:
5. (Extreme) Environments – Islands, Coasts, Margins, Centres
Session format:
Regular session

Title & Content

Title:
Neanderthals of the North: Agency, Ecology and Climate in Challenging Landscapes [PaM]
Content:
While the first Neanderthal fossils were discovered in western Europe, their archaeological and biological remains have now been found across a broad geographic range, covering most areas of the Eurasian continent, including latitudes up to 53 degrees North. Neanderthals also were around over a relatively large time span, from ca. 400,000 to 40,000 years ago, covering several climatic oscillations. Consequently, it is clear that Neanderthals lived across a plethora of different environmental conditions, as well as radically different and challenging climates, and resilience-testing landscapes.
The scope of this session is to bring together case studies, local and supra-regional overviews, new discoveries and upcoming research projects focused on Neanderthal settlement strategies across the most challenging conditions in Northwest and Central Europe (covering the area from northern France into Poland, and from Britain down to the Alps). The session has a particular focus on the interactions between environment and material culture, including coping mechanisms, adaptive behaviours and innovative strategies. We especially encourage the submission of papers with an interdisciplinary approach, integrating data from lithic, faunal and environmental records, both from new excavations and from existing museum collections.
Keywords:
Middle Palaeolithic, Environment, Lithics
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
PaM

Organisers

Main organiser:
Gianpiero Di Maida (Germany) 1
Co-organisers:
Karen Ruebens (France) 2
Andrzej Wiśniewski (Poland) 3
Marcel Weiß (Germany) 4
Affiliations:
1. CCEHN – Niedersächsisches Landesamt für Denkmalpflege
2. Chaire de Paléoanthropologie, Collège de France
3. Institute of Archaeology, University of Wrocław
4. Institut für Ur- und Frühgeschichte, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg