Session: #666

Content:

While advances in survey methods for studying past landscapes have been a boon, comprehensive approaches for mapping Stone Age land use remain challenging to design and implement. This is particularly true for more elusive aspects of such activity, such as settlement and occupation traces of Palaeolithic and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. Often, this elusiveness is exacerbated by pedological and geographic configuration of study areas: peatlands and mountainous areas are notoriously challenging environments for identifying well-preserved remains. While offering more potential for more recent periods, limited preservation potential and shallow soils of dryland areas often result in a striking absence of these subtle traces of prehistoric land use.

The expanding archaeological prospection toolkit does, however, create new opportunities. By accounting for strengths and limitations of complementary survey methods, some recent, well-structured integrated approaches enable detailed palaeolandscape reconstructions, and can provide fine-grained site-specific insight into cultural activities. Still, such advances remain marginal and little integrated into general prehistoric archaeology, and development-led archaeological frameworks - with particular consequences for the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic. While available survey toolkits are promising, their implementation into daily field practice remains variable, restricting the potential of this archaeological resource. Although in some regions, fine-tuning prospection strategies has increased the quantity of informative Stone Age sites, in other areas this number has stagnated or – e.g., following intensified farming, forestry or drainage practices – deteriorated.

This session aims to bridge the gap between fundamental questions related to Palaeolithic to elusive types of Neolithic archaeology, and established and novel survey approaches. We consider archaeological prospection in its broadest sense: from non-invasive (e.g., remote sensing, geophysics, predictive modelling), to minimally (borehole, direct-push) and highly invasive (test pitting, trial trenching) methods, complemented with spatial sampling strategies tailored to elusive prehistoric targets. Here, we particularly welcome contributions that present integrated survey approaches in challenging environments.

Session: #666

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