Transitions, change and identity : the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic of Vasco-Cantabrian Spain

Abstract

Current thinking in the Palaeolithic divides the archaeological record into a succession of discrete ‘cultures’ defined in terms of lithic industries, thus creating ‘points’ of ‘transition’.  At the infamous ‘Middle-Upper Palaeolithic transition’ the problems of this approach are exacerbated because the transition being debated is central to our own identity and thus has a long history which strongly influences our current thinking about the ‘nature’ of humanity.  As the ‘transition’ from animal to human, Neanderthal to ‘modern’ is seen as being both behavioural and biological, differences in the archaeological record have been explained away as caused by ‘evolution’, applied in a simplistic post hoc, accommodative way.

This ‘top-down’ perspective assumes qualitative differences between Neanderthals and ‘modern’ humans, particularly in terms of their mental abilities regarding abstract through and the ability to structure or ‘design’ activities that occur at some distance in time and/or space.  Such assumptions are dangerous in the limitations that they place on the interpretation of the record - hominids, sites, industries, etc., can only ever be ‘modern’ or ‘non-modern’, which both categories pre-defined and pre-‘explained’.  In this thesis I argue that, rather than assuming such difference, ‘bottom-up’ approaches need to be developed to reconsider the archaeological record of the ‘transition’ in terms of people, movement and activity. 

I argue that both hominid and human populations were inevitably immersed within a four-dimensional world as a fundamental fact of their existence and that, crucially, these ecosystems are not individual and discrete but are inescapably shared with other ‘persons’, whether these are hominid or human, animal, mineral or vegetable, with whom we interact on a daily basis.  Thus the archaeological record represents four-dimensional structures of peoples’ habitual, daily activities, comprised of movement and interaction within a four-dimensional ecosystem: the constitutve parts of identity and personhood.

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