Reindeer Hunters of the Middle Paleolithic: Investigating Neandertal Subsistence Strategies in Quina Mousterian Contexts of Southwestern France

• Main Author: Lagle, Susan Elisabeth
• Other Authors: Steele, Teresa E
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: English
• Published: eScholarship, University of California 2021
• Subjects: Archaeology; Neandertals; Quina Mousterian; Seasonality; Skeletal Part Representation; Southwestern France; Zooarchaeology; Marsal; Rangifer tarandus
• Online Access: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6g21n84j

Since their discovery over a century ago, Neandertals have been the subject of myriad studies concerning their behavior, biology, and evolutionary relationship with humans. Despite decades of intensive research, the behavior of our closest relatives remains among the more contentious topics of paleoanthropology. Beginning in the mid-20th century, researchers began to recognize the complexity of the growing Middle Paleolithic archaeological record associated with Neandertals, particularly the variability in their lithic assemblages. Lithic studies have remained a cornerstone of behavioral investigations, but the faunal record is also recognized as a crucial component for exploring Neandertal lifeways. Changes in prey resource type and availability in differing environmental contexts likely impacted how Neandertals navigated their landscape, affecting both hunting and prey processing practices as well as tool-making decisions. Quina Mousterian lithic assemblages in southwestern France are often associated with faunal assemblages with high proportions of reindeer (Rangifer tarandus), leading to suggestions that the characteristic Quina scrapers with intensive retouch signify a flexible, adaptable, and highly mobile toolkit appropriate for seasonal hunting of this possibly migratory species. This idea must be more fully explored through systematic zooarchaeological studies of mobility-related topics such as seasonality and prey carcass transport.This study begins to address these questions through zooarchaeological analyses of Quina-associated faunal assemblages from three sites in southwestern France: Roc de Marsal Level 4, Jonzac Level 22, and Pech de l'Azé IV Level 4a. Previous studies looked at subsets of these assemblages but I sought to generate complete datasets using consistent methodology, which required a full analysis of Roc de Marsal and an analysis of small materials from screening at Jonzac and Pech d l'Azé IV. Seasonality is investigated through studies of teeth (dental eruption and wear and cementum annuli) and fetal bone, while carcass transport is investigated through studies of skeletal part representation. Because these topics were discussed in previous Jonzac and Pech de l'Azé studies that relied only on plotted materials, I explored the varying impact of including screened materials on these and other study topics like species representation, mortality profiles, and butchery. Finally, I developed a new multi-level Bayesian Poisson model for studying skeletal part representation (SPR) that explores how the relative proportion of recorded elements from the sites relates to nutritional indicators like marrow cavity volume and the food utility index, given the effects of bone density. All three sites had different seasonality signatures, with Roc de Marsal showing use throughout the year while Jonzac was primarily used in the fall-winter and Pech de l'Azé in the spring-summer. I was also able to compare the three sites in terms of prey selection, with Pech de l'Azé IV having mostly juvenile reindeer while Roc de Marsal and Jonzac also had high numbers of prime adults. All three sites show extensive butchery, little carnivore activity, and no notable evidence of burning. My conclusions are mostly consistent with previous studies, except that earlier work at Jonzac indicated that carcass transport was not related to bone marrow content but the new SPR model suggests otherwise. Because of pandemic-related travel restrictions, some data from Roc de Marsal remains to be collected; the complete data will allow more comprehensive comparative analyses that will more fully address mobility-related connections between subsistence and technology in Quina Mousterian and other contexts in southwestern France.