Mobility and Place Making in Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Italy

Abstract

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Abstract This paper offers a revised overview and model of Late Pleistocene and Early Holocenehunter-gatherers in Italy, one that questions and extends existing materialist, evolutionary and ecological perspectives through an emphasis on the socio-cultural dynamics of mobility and place making. Particular attention is paid to selected caves and rock shelters, which gained an anchoring power through the repeated performance of mundane and ritual practices, but never to the point of immobile sedentism.

Issues of theory and method in the analysis of Paleolithic mortuary behavior: A view from Shanidar Cave

“…These activities must have depended on both their spatial cognition and the "legibility" of the landscapes that they traversed 1. Legibility is a concept drawn from geography105 that captures spatial coherence of the landscape and the availability of navigational aids, both physical and sociocultural (places imbued with special and persistent significance from past shared experiences).Many caves in Italy may have held such special significance for LateUpper Paleolithic and Mesolithic hunter-gatherer populations 106. Arene Candide, for example, was used both for occupation and for burial, the latter on repeated occasions with skeletal parts being F I G U R E 6 Photomicrographs of natural and anthropogenic sediments.…”