Catching a Glimpse of Mesolithic Settlement Patterns and Site Re-occupation Through Lithic Refitting, Raw Material Characterizations and Absolute Dating

Abstract

Contemporaneity of spatially distinct activity areas at prehistoric sites is often inferred based on lithic refit connections alone. These connections are, in addition, only rarely discussed in detail, nor are they explicitly subjected to any form of critical assessment. In this paper, we present a combined use of Bayesian modeling of 14 C-dates, raw material characterizations and lithic refitting to investigate the occurrence of interconnected artefact clusters at the Belgian Mesolithic site of Kerkhove. Besides this, a set of parameters is presented that is employed to control the reliability of the refit connections. The three proxies applied in this paper suggest that the Early Mesolithic occupation of the site was organized as two diachronic and more or less parallel alignments of artefact clusters. Based on the lithic refitting results, two scenarios can be considered to explain the formation histories of these linear arrangements. The individual artefact clusters incorporated within them were either occupied in a strictly contemporaneous manner or in a (partly) sequential manner.

Unraveling Early Holocene occupation patterns at El Arenal de la Virgen (Alicante, Spain) open-air site: an integrated palimpsest analysis

“…Such a scenario supports the need to promote the application of extensive, quantitative, multidisciplinary and integrated approaches to the analysis of palimpsests. They have indeed proven to be exceptionally informative in the case of El Arenal de la Virgen, as well as in other contexts and case studies that have adopted different multidisciplinary research strategies (Crombé 2005;Zubrow et al 2010;Carbonell 2012;Julien and Karlin 2014;Séara 2014;Mallol et al 2019;Marín et al 2019;Spagnolo et al 2020b;Real et al 2020;Sánchez-Romero et al 2020;Spagnolo et al 2020a;Moncel et al 2021;Vandendriessche et al 2022). Extending this kind of research to different kinds of contexts would improve our knowledge of intra-site occupation dynamics and regional settlement systems.…”

“…Addressing the intra-site spatial and temporal dimensions of archaeological site formation, drawing from the palimpsest conception, would ultimately allow to properly define site structure and occupation dynamics (i.e. discriminating long/ short occupation time, residential/task specific locations or aggregation/band camps) (Crombé et al 2006;Vandendriessche et al 2022;Crawford et al 2023).…”

“…The postglacial archaeological record can offer an extraordinary opportunity to improve our understanding of the relationship between site structure, site function and occupation length on open-air sites. A key issue is that the preservation state of organic materials is often sufficient to yield radiocarbon datasets with enough resolution to build robust chronologies, involving internal phasing and Bayesian chronological modelling for addressing intra-site spatiotemporal dynamics (Crombé et al 2006(Crombé et al , 2013Wicks and Mithen 2014;Blockley et al 2018;Vandendriessche et al 2022;Fernández-López de Pablo et al 2023).…”