Theme:
5. (Extreme) Environments – Islands, Coasts, Margins, Centres
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Breaking the Barriers. Tracing Palaeolithic Human Mobility across Mountainous Environments [PaM]
Content:
Traditionally, mountains have been considered impassable barriers for past human populations, especially during the most climatically and environmentally severe episodes of the Pleistocene. In addition, the harsh conditions that are inherent to most of these altitude environments, including highland plateaux, led archaeologists to underestimate them as potential occupation zones in many cases. As a consequence, for many years our interests and efforts turned away from these regions in favour of more “optimal” contexts, such as valleys and coastal areas.
However, the development and spread in the last decades of studies on human mobility has changed our view of the Palaeolithic territoriality and mobility patterns. The transit routes resulting from these new approaches have showed that mountain environments were not only viable areas (with at least a rich seasonal exploitable biotope) for Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, but also more or less frequent transit regions in different situations during the Pleistocene.
The subsequent growing importance of these contexts in Archaeology is reflected in the proliferation of research projects, work groups and publications devoted to the study of how prehistoric humans settled and crossed mountainous landscapes. This session aims to become a new step in this trend, being a scientific forum for the discussion on the role of mountainous environments in relation to the patterns of mobility, territoriality, settlement and subsistence of Palaeolithic human groups. It will encompass works with a main focus on mobility across (or in relation to) mountainous and highland regions throughout the Pleistocene, including from broad material-based studies on mobility to more specific GIS-based analyses, through those grounded in environmental or ethnological data. Finally, this session has a global scope and has no restrictions concerning topography, biotopes or climates.
Keywords:
Human mobility, Mountainous environments, Transit routes, Palaeolithic, Pleistocene
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
Main organiser:
Aitor Calvo (Spain) 1,2,3
Co-organisers:
Marianne Deschamps (France) 4,5
Manuel Alcaraz-Castaño (Spain) 6
Affiliations:
1. Seminari d’Estudis i Recerques Prehistòriques (SERP), University of Barcelona (UB), Spain
2. Institute of Archaeology of the University of Barcelona (IAUB), Spain
3. Department of Geography, Prehistory and Archaeology, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Spain
4. CNRS, TRACES - UMR5608, Maison de la Recherche, Toulouse, France
5. UNIARQ, Centro da Arqueologia da Universidade de Lisboa, FLULisboa, Portugal
6. Area of Prehistory (Department of History and Philosophy), University of Alcalá, Spain
THIS SESSION CAN NOT BE SELECTED AT THIS MOMENT