Dissertation: Landscape Learning in the Late Glacial Recolonization of Northwestern Europe

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

With the support of Dr. Steven Kuhn, Ms. Marcy Rockman will collect and analyze data for her doctoral dissertation. Using the example of the resettlement of northwestern Europe at the end of the last Ice Age, she will study how humans come to know and use natural resources when they can only learn about them from the landscape itself. During the last Ice Age, which dates to approximately 20,000 to 14,000 years ago, the ice sheets reached almost to the location of present-day London and human populations were concentrated in southwestern France and in the central Rhine valley. By the time the ice retreated, the region from the Paris Basin northward through the British Isles had been abandoned for at least 6,000 years. The first humans to re- enter this area had to learn the locations and limitations of the region's natural resources anew, using only their knowledge of landscape from which they had come and their own experiences in the unfamiliar environment. While such colonizations with limited information have taken place many times throughout human history, the actual process by which humans learn a new landscape is not yet well understood. Ms. Rockman's research will develop a means of studying this process and focus closely on the very beginnings of the modern human occupation of northwestern Europe. In this study, the landscape learning process will be studied from the perspective of human discovery and early use of outcrops of chert, a fine-grained rock commonly used to make stone tools in prehistory. Ms. Rockman will collect published stone tool sourcing, radiocarbon date, and other artifact assemblage information from sites dating between approximately 14,000 and 9,500 years ago from England, northern France, and eastern Belgium. Selected extant stone tool collections representing this full time range will be studied in regard to the range of rock and particularly chert types represented. Using the stone tool sourcing information as a guide to specific geological features and areas, Ms. Rockman will take field measurements of the topography of the chert sources. All this data will then be combined in geographic information systems (GIS) analyses. Final interpretations will be made from the characteristics and use patterns of individual chert sources and comparison of the overall complexity of land use across the late glacial and early post-glacial time periods. This project will provide help to explain how humans learn to live in a new place. It will provide a base of both data and method against which archaeologists may test other colonizations. It will serve as an example of the potential of combined archaeological, geological, and computer modeling research, and it will contribute to the interdisciplinary training of a promising young scientist.