Site function and the ‘ibex‐site phenomenon’: myth or reality?

Abstract

Summary. This paper focuses on ibex hunting in Italy during the Upper Palaeolithic. The faunal assemblages from five ibex‐dominated sites (Dalmeri, Arene Candide, Fumane, Villabruna and Soman) are examined with the aim of assessing the role of the sites and people's activities in the wider settlement system. These sites will be placed in their wider context of the Italian Upper Palaeolithic so as to explore the nature of variability in ibex exploitation. The importance of these considerations is to examine aspects of specialized hunting, increased intensity of resource exploitation during the end of the Upper Palaeolithic, and methodological considerations of the relationship between faunal remains and the human activities that produced them.

Neanderthal palaeoecology in the late Middle Palaeolithic of western Iberia: a stable isotope analysis of ungulate teeth from Lapa do Picareiro (Portugal)

“…Ibex, though a resilient ungulate, has slightly less ecological plasticity than red deer. Ibex are typically considered high‐altitude ungulates that prefer steep rocky areas in modern times, but archaeological data suggest they also occupied lower elevations during the Late Pleistocene (Freeman, 1973; Phoca‐Cosmetatou, 2002). While they tend to graze more than red deer, ibex are flexible feeders, shifting altitudinally, searching for food, foraging at the wetter, higher altitudes during the dry summers, and at lower altitudes in the spring, when there is generally more precipitation at lower elevations (Parrini et al ., 2003).…”

Human subsistence change in the Late Pleistocene Mediterranean Basin

“…The shifts in the Late Pleistocene faunal record that have received the most attention include a narrowing of the dietary spectrum to focus on one or two large game species (specialisation) and at the opposite end of the continuum, an expansion in dietary breadth to include less cost-effective resources (diversification). Specialisation has most often been used to describe the early Upper Palaeolithic focus on reindeer and ibex hunting in western Europe (Mellars 1973;Phoca-Cosmetatou 2004;Straus 1977Straus , 1987Straus , 1995; see also Costamagno 2003Costamagno , 2004Grayson & Delpech 2002 for contra argument), but has been reported from other spatial and temporal contexts as well (Atici, this series). The specialisation and diver-sification of human diets have both been connected to subsistence intensification and to patterns of demographic growth, technological change and site occupation intensity that characterise the period between ca 50,000 and 10,000 BP in the Mediterranean region.…”

The Upper Palaeolithic of Europe

“…In Iberia, except for short periods and in restricted regions located in the foothills of the Pyrenees, reindeer were either entirely absent or economically unimportant. Complemented by horse and, in mountainous areas and in lowland but steep limestone country, the seasonal hunting of ibex (Straus 1987;Phoca-Cosmetatou 2004), the bulk of subsistence hunting fell upon red deer and aurochs, which are territorial animals. For hunter-gatherers exploiting terrestrial game of about the same size and in similar open-woodland environments, such as the Ona/Selk'nam guanaco hunters from Tierra del Fuego, the ethnographic evidence indicates territories and population densities of the same order of magnitude (García-Moro et al 1997).…”