PeOPLE · Personal Ornaments in the Palaeolithic of Europe
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2018-02-01 → 2020-01-31
- EU contribution
- €173,076
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Personal Ornaments in the Palaeolithic of Europe
"This project sought to reconsider the cultural and social structure of the Upper Palaeolithic (ca. 45,000–11,000 years ago) of Eastern Europe by studying the personal ornaments found at archaeological sites across the region. Personal ornaments – beads, pendants, etc – can provide key information on past cultural links and diversity. They can provide a new perspective on traditional frameworks of ancient cultural structuration that are based mainly on stone tool types. The traditional frameworks that archaeologists use for Eastern Europe have been difficult to integrate with larger-scale European and Eurasian frameworks. This is largely because there are numerous Upper Palaeolithic cultural units that are identified in Eastern Europe only but not elsewhere. However, it is not clear whether these units truly reflect past cultural diversity, or whether they are the product of regional research histories or some other factor. The study of personal ornaments, if carried out systematically and on a large scale, can provide a new perspective on this problem. These kinds of studies are important for society because they help to test widespread assumptions about past human societies. Often, Upper Palaeolithic societies – and populations – are put into a series of named ""boxes"" that do not truly reflect the complexity of cultural processes in the past. These overly simplistic ideas about how human society worked in the past can in turn give rise to damaging assumptions about the ""natural"" or ""normal"" state of human society and human interactions. Archaeologists have a responsibility to find better ways to describe the true complexity of the processes that took place in the past, and this project forms one small part of this endeavour. The overall objectives of this project include the following: - Creation of the first database of Upper Palaeolithic personal ornaments in Eastern Europe and surrounding regions - Analysis of this data using statistical and network analysis methods - Comparison of the results with the traditional framework used for the classification of sites and assemblages and investigation of the differences between them"
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The project PeOPLE (Personal Ornaments in the PalaeoLithic of Europe) seeks a new perspective on the archaeological framework for Eastern Europe during the earlier part of the Upper Palaeolithic (UP) by study of the beads and other personal ornaments known from sites of this period. The study period covers ca. 45,000-25,000 years ago – the first twenty thousand years of modern human occupation of ice age Europe. Our knowledge of cultural change and variation in the UP is based heavily on lithic artefacts: stone tools and the waste from their production. There are numerous shortcomings in our present understanding of Palaeolithic cultural variation, especially in Eastern Europe. Personal ornaments, which have been found in large numbers at sites of this period, represent an underused resource for understanding UP cultural diversity and connections in this region. The known corpus of these artefacts will be studied based on published sources and by direct examination of selected collections using established techniques. Attributes of the artefacts themselves and of their archaeological contexts will be recorded. A database will be produced which will be analysed using statistical techniques, including some borrowed from genetics. The results of the analysis will be compared with the current archaeological framework for this period and, where possible, with genetic trees based on aDNA studies. The project offers great scope for testing and refining our current understanding of cultural variation and change during this period. It will also provide an excellent test-case for some theoretical anthropological questions, regarding e.g. human responses to climate change and the spread and persistence of material culture traditions. Communication and outreach is an important part of this project. This will include the creation of open-access resources, including 3D scans of artefacts where possible, and targeted outreach activities.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITE DE BORDEAUX · BordeauxCoordinatorFrance
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union