Humans at the End of the lee Age The Archaeology of the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition INTERDISCIPLINARY CONTRIBUTIONS TO ARCHAEOLOGY Series Editor: Michael]ochim, University of Califomia, Santa Barbara Founding Editor: Roy S. Dickens, Jr., Late of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hili Current Volurnes in This Series: THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF WEAL TH Consumer Behavior in English America James G. Gibb CASE STUDIES IN ENVIRONMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY Edited by Elizabeth J. Reitz, Lee A. Newsom, and Sylvia J. Scudder CHESAPEAKE PREHISTORY Old Traditions, New Directions Richard J. Dent, Jr. DARWINIAN ARCHAEOLOGIES Edited by Herben Donald Graham Maschner DIVERSITY AND COMPLEXITY IN PREHISTORIC MARITIME SOCIETIES A Gulf of Maine Perspective Bruce J. Bourque HUMANS AT THE END OF THE ICE AGE The Archaeology of the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition Edited by Lawrence Guy Straus, Berit Valentin Eriksen, Jon M. Erlandson and David R. Yesner PREHISTORIC CULTURAL ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION Insights from Southern Jordan Donald O. Henry REGIONAL APPROACHES TO MORTUARY ANALYSIS Edited by Lane Anderson Beck STATISTICS FOR ARCHAEOLOGISTS A Commonsense Approach Roben D. Drennan STONE TOOLS Theoretical Insights into Human Prehistory Edited by George H. Odell STYLE, SOCIETY, AND PERSON Archaeological and Ethnological Perspectives Edited by Christopher Carr andJill E. Neitzel A Chronological Listing of Volurnes in this series appears at the back of this volurne. A Continuation Order Plan is available for this series. A continuation order will bring delivery of each new volume immediately upon publication. Volumes are billed only upon actual shipment. For further information please contact the publisher. Humans at the End of the lee Age The Archaeology of the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition Edited by LA WRENCE GUY STRAUS University 01 New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico BERIT VA LE NT IN ERIKSEN University 01 Aarhus H0jbjerg, Denmark JON M. ERLANDSON University 010regon Eugene, Oregon and DA VID R. YESNER University 01 Alaska Anchorage, Alaska PLENUM PRESS • NEW YORK AND LONDON Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Humans at the end of the Ice Age : the archaeology of the Pleistocene -Holocene transition I edited by Lawrence Guy Straus ... [et al.l. p. cm. -- (Interdisciplinary contributions to archaeology> Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-306-45177-8 1. Man, Prehistoric. 2. Man--Influence of climate. 3. Agriculture--Origin. 4. Paleoecolo~y--Holncene. 5. Paleoecology--Pleistocene. 6. Glacial epoch. I. Straus, Lawrence Guy. II. Series. GN741.H85 1996 930.1--dc20 96-8914 CIP ISBN 978-1-4612-8447-5 ISBN 978-1-4613-1145-4 (eBook) DOl 10.1007/978-1-4613-1145-4 © 1996 Plenum Press, New York Softcover reprint of hardcover 1s t edition 1996 A Division of Plenum Publishing Corporation 233 Spring Street, New York, N. Y. 10013 1098765432 All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written.permission from the Publisher Contributors C. Melvin Aikens • Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403-1218 Takeru Akazawa • University Museum, University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113, Japan Jim Allen • Department of Archaeology, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria 3083, Australia David G. Anderson • National Park Service, Atlanta, Georgia 30303 Ofer Bar-Yosef • Department of Anthropology, Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 Robson Bonnichsen • Department of Anthropology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon 97331 Luis Alberto Borrero • Prehistoric Studies Program, University of Buenos Aires, 1039 Buenos Aires, Argentina Angela E. Close • Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle, Wash ington 98195 Pavel M. Dolukhanov • Department of Archaeology, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon-Tyne NEl 7RU, United Kingdom Berit Valentin Eriksen • Department of Prehistoric Archaeology, University of Aarhus, Moesgaard, 8270 H0jbjerg, Denmark ]on M. Erlandson • Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403-1218 George C. Frison • Department of Anthropology, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyo ming 82071 Albert C. Goodyear • Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina 29208 Michael A.]ochim • Department of Anthropology, University of Califomia, Santa Barbara, Califomia 93106 v vi CONTRIBUTORS Peter Kershaw • Department of Geography and Environmental Science, Monash Univer sity, Melboume 3168, Australia Peter J. Mitchell • Pitt Rivers Museum Research Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6PN, United Kingdom Dan E Morse • Arkansas Archeological Survey, State University, Arkansas 72467 Madonna L. Moss • Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403-1218 John E. Parkington • Department of Archaeology, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7700, Cape Town, South Africa Surin Pookajom • Faculty of Archaeology, Silpakom University, Bangkok 10200, Thailand William R. Powers • Department of Anthropology, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Alaska 97707 Romuald Schild • Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences, 00-140 Warsaw, Poland Lawrence Guy Straus • Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, Albu querque, New Mexico 87131 Royden Yates • Department of Archaeology, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7700, Cape Town, South Africa David R. Yesner • Department of Anthropology, University of Alaska, Anchorage, Alaska 99508 Preface This book is about the diverse responses ofhuman societies worldwide to the environmental changes of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition between 13,000 and 8,000 years ago. Those changes were extreme in many regions, especially at the middle and high latitudes, and attenuated in equatorial regions. But in all inhabited continents, there were shifts in climate, seasonality, sea levels, ice cover, vegetation, fauna, and soils across the Last Glacial Interglacial boundary. Just as some aspects of environmental change were abrupt and others more gradual, so too were the adaptive reactions ofhuman forager groups around the world. This book chronicles and explores the significance of the variety of cultural responses. The transition from the Last Glacial to the Present Interglacial, centered on 10,000 BP and now known in great detail, was just one of a couple of dozen such transitions that have occurred since the Cenozoic Ice Ages began some 2.5 million years ago. Yet only at this last glacial-interglacial boundary were there anatomically modem humans living on all the conti nents and major islands (except Antarctica and Greenland), at relatively high densities in some regions, and in some cases at fairly high latitudes. And only shortly after this glacial interglacial transition did many human groups find it necessary or at least very useful to adopt food production, shifting from a 5-million-year-old universal subsistence strategy of pure exploitation of wild food resources that had involved gathering, scavenging, hunting, and eventually fishing. What was it about the last glacial-interglacial transition that was different? What was this transition so significant in the history of our hominid family? A subtext of this book is this question: Why was agriculture adopted quickly thereafter in some regions but not in others? Why did hunter-gatherers successfully adapt as such in many regions and in some cases survive into the twentieth century? This volume includes chapters by speciahsts in the Late Last Glacial prehistory of many of the most -studied regions of the world. Each addresses in his or her own way the specific nature and consequences of the environmental changes of the end of the Pleistocene, detailing the nature, speed, and magnitude of the cultural changes that occurred in the chosen regions. Continental overviews and comparisons are provided throughout by the volume's editors and in a general concluding chapter by series editor Michael Jochim, himself a specialist in hunter-gatherer ecology and in the prehistory of the transition in Germany. The volume had its origin in and is the first publication of a Working Group on Archeology of the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition, established by Hans-Jurgen Müller- vii viii PREFACE Beck, President of the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA) Commission for the Paleoecology of Early Man. Preliminary versions of the chapters were presented at the 1994 meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Anaheim, California, with financial support from Müller-Beck and the International Research and Exchanges Board. LAWRENCE GUY STRAUS Chair of the INQUA Working Group Contents PART I. INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter 1. The World at the End of the Last Ice Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Lawrence Guy Straus PART 11. THE PLEISTOCENE-HOLOCENE TRANSITION IN AFRICA AND THE NEAR EAST 11 Lawrence Guy Straus Chapter 2. At the Transition: The Archaeology of the Pleistocene- Holocene Boundary in Southern Africa ..................... 15 Peter ]. MitchelI, Royden Yates, and John E. Parkington Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Palaeoenvironmental Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 The Cultural-Stratigraphic Framework .................................. 18 Subsistence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Art, Personal Ornament, and Burial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Changes in Human Settlement Patterns, Demography, and Interaction .. . . . . . . . 28 Discussion ......................................................... 33 References ...... .................................................. 36 Chapter 3. Plus 'a Change: The Pleistocene-Holocene Transition in Northeast Africa ........................................ 43 Angela E. Close Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Environments of the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition ...................... 43 Archaeology of the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition ....................... 46 Conclusion and Aftermath ............................................ 56 References 57 ix x Contents Chapter 4. The Impact of Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene Climatic Changes on Humans in Southwest Asia .................... 61 Ofer Bar-Yosef Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 The Region . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 General Considerations in Reconstructing the Paleoclimatic Sequence of Southwest Asia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 The Reconstructed Paleoclimatic Sequence ............................... 66 The Impact of Climatic Changes on Humans ............................. 68 The Impact of Climatic Changes on Cultural Entities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 References ......................................................... 74 PART III. THE PLEISTOCENE-HOLOCENE TRANSITION IN EUROPE 79 Berit Valentin Eriksen Chapter 5. The Archaeology of the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition in Southwest Europe ....................................... 83 Lawrence Guy Straus Introduction . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 Chronostratigraphie and Paleoclimatic Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Traditional Cultural-Historical Frameworks .............................. 87 Resources and Subsistence Strategies .................................... 90 Conclusions ........................................................ 94 References ......................................................... 96 Chapter 6. Resource Exploitation, Subsistence Strategies, and Adaptiveness in Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene Northwest Europe ................................................ 101 Berit Valentin Eriksen Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 10 1 Geographie Study Areas .............................................. 102 Geochronologieal Framework-Climate and Vegetation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 The Faunal Remains-Source Evaluation and Fauna History ................ 110 Exploiting the Faunal Resources-Subsistence Analyses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 References ......................................................... 125 Chapter 7. The North European Plain and Eastern Sub-Balticum between 12,700 and 8,000 129 BP ..................................... Romuald Schild Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 129