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Abstract

W e wish to take this opportunity to respond to H. Bricker's comment (2010) about our assessment of the case for an Aurignacian-Châtelperronian interstratification at the Châtelperronian 'type site' of Grotte des Fées de Châtelperron (Riel-Salvatore et al. 2008). We are pleased to see that it has generated some interest, and thank Bricker for taking the time to express his concerns.Bricker takes issue with our general approach to typology, which he considers unorthodox, if not downright heretical. His critique boils down to the fact that we used types that, in his view, do not define the Aurignacian as it was traditionally defined by de Sonneville-Bordes and Perrot. The irony is that we largely agree with him and were explicit about this in our study. Why did we resort to creating more inclusive versions of the Aurignacian Index? Quite simply because the only previous typological assessment of the Grotte des Fées Châtelperronian, based on the retouched tools from all five cuts from Level B, yielded a GA value of precisely zero. This value derives from typological data in an unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (Harrold 1978) that Bricker considers "good" (i.e., reliable). Yet, Bricker asserts that "the recent detailed examination of the relevant material by Zilhão and his colleagues should be accepted as correct." Because that study indicates that up to 8.2% of the assemblage from the supposedly interstratified Aurignacian Level B4 consists of Aurignacian diagnostics, it is clear that something is amiss in the typological systematics used to make these assessments. Is it a matter of determining who is the better typologist (see Sackett [1988] for an insightful discussion of this issue)? Or is it more likely that Zilhão et al. (2006Zilhão et al. ( , 2008 and Gravina et al. (2005) simply used a list of Aurignacian diagnostics that is more inclusive than the traditional one devised over half a century ago? We think the latter, and that Bricker does not comment on this fundamental discrepancy effectively vitiates much of his critique.Some of Bricker's remarks also strike us as contradictory. On the one hand, he chastises us for the seemingly uncontroversial observation that mobility patterns and sample size must be taken into account in these assessments. But, after dismissing these concerns as of "dubious relevance," he then asserts that we do not come to "a meaningful conclusion." As for the "putative" Aurignacian tools, we stand by our contention that laminar technologies can generate only a rather limited range of tool morphologies, all of them easily produced by competent flint knappers. This equifinality is, in our view, sufficient to explain the presence of such items in most Châtelperronian assemblages. We are thus puzzled by Bricker's observation that the Châtelperronian at Les Tambourets contains 1.77-2.15%PaleoAnthropology 2010: L10−L11.