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11 From Excavations to Demographics The primary question addressed in this volume involves domestic organization in the Magdalenian of the Paris Basin. This comprises fundamental ideas about human society , how people relate to one another in economic, social, and personal ways. It implies demography, the make-up of the social group, and how we might see this from the archaeological record. Much of our knowledge about the organization of Paleolithic hunters’ campsites has come from Leroi-Gourhan’s innovative excavation, recording, and interpretation techniques. He was able to demonstrate clearly from the extraordinarily well-preserved remains of several occupation levels at Pincevent that robust patterning could be read from the distribution of heterogeneous classes of artifacts and features on large-scale surfaces. The integration of the numerous classes of data was the tool for moving from mere description to a structural understanding of the interrelationships among various patterns extant in those distributions, the basis for inferences about the social and economic relationships among the prehistoric occupants of those campsites. The large surface excavated on the level IV-20 at Pincevent yielded multiple redundantly organized clusters of features and artifacts that are quite plausibly interpreted as domestic households for the social group inhabiting the site. Further analyses of the spatial distributions of refitted flint, fire-cracked rock, and bones have confirmed the contemporaneity and integrated nature of those households (Bodu et Julien 1987; Julien et al. 1992; Enloe and David 1989, 1992). His successes at this led to emulation of his techniques for excavation and recording and of his conventions for interpretation. While the former has helped increase our resolution of the patterning potentially present on occupation surfaces, the latter has often led to normative inferences about the nature of archaeological sites. This can lead to a tendency to Chapter One Technology and Demographics An Introduction James G. Enloe 12 Technology and Demography replicate interpretations of the kinds of domestic units seen at Pincevent—“discovering” the same Magdalenian social structure at other sites. This presumes that all sites were residential and that the demography of the social groups was essentially the same at all Magdalenian sites: adult males and females accompanied by juveniles and infants of both sexes. Another perspective suggests that demography, and consequent social and economic organization, might vary among sites as a function of the organization of labor for procuring, processing, and consuming resources across a larger landscape. This has been one of the primary objectives of the excavation and analysis of Verberie. This Magdalenian site shares may aspects with the better-known excavation at Pincevent— dating, typology, technology, and faunal remains, among many others. It was excavated with essentially the same techniques and perspectives, and provides a suitably comparable dataset for posing many of the same interpretive questions as were posed and answered at Pincevent. One of the most vibrant debates among the excavators and analysts centers on the question of demography at Verberie. Was this site occupied by a population of family groups, including males and females of all ages, as appears to be the case at Pincevent, or was it occupied by some subset of that population, engaged in specialized tasks involving acquisition of resources to the main consumer group elsewhere? Hunters and Gatherers on the Landscape When Lewis Binford (1980) proposed his famous models to characterize the mobility of hunter/gatherer groups, he was less concerned with an exhaustive description of subsistence organization than with the implications of variability in mobility, which might result in different kinds of sites in the archaeological record. He proposed that subsistence organization ranged from foraging to logistical collecting as a function of the structure of resource availability in the environment. In the case of foragers, where resources are more or less ubiquitously and unpredictably dispersed throughout the environment, hunters and gatherers “mapped on” to resources across the landscape by means of residential mobility, moving the entire social group of producers and consumers from resource depleted areas to places where the entire range of necessary resources would be available for acquisition within a short daily foraging radius, in essence moving consumers to resources for immediate consumption (Testart 1982; Woodburn 1968). Differential success among members of foraging groups could be resolved by a variety of risk sharing behavior (Wiessner 1980, 1982), most notably food sharing. In this case, the entire demographic group repositions itself repeatedly on the landscape, creating a dispersed pattern of very similar sites. In the case of logistical collectors, hunters and gatherers, key resources are...

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