Recent studies in the Final Palaeolithic of the European plain, (Proceedings of a UISPP Symposium, Stockholm 1999), 2002, 208 p. - Actes Colloques UISPP

The Final Palaeolithic cultures of the European Plain were characterized by a variety of adaptive responses, reflected in technologies, settlement patterns, subsistence practices, social organizations and, possibly, ideologies. Underlying this regional diversity of specific environmental and cultural changes were the fundamentals of climatic change in conditions that were relatively rapid and extreme and that very likely would have had major influence on contemporary hunter-gatherer land-use patterns. By encouraging discussion of analogous or contrasting patterns in subsistence and settlement patterns and landscape use among geographically and geomorphologically different regions across most of Northwestern Europe (from Latvia to Belgium and from Switzerland to Central Sweden), this volume aims at a detailed inter- as well as intra-regional comparison and contrast of approaches and results. The different chapters provide case studies and/or exhaustive reviews of currently available data from Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland. Although contributions derive from several different research traditions they share important analytical and methodological approaches. They discuss general problems such as the reconstruction of Lateglacial environments, the chronology of Final Palaeolithic colonization or questions of cultural differentiation, or they present reports concerning the most interesting and important recent discoveries from different parts of the Plain. The reader thus has an opportunity here to get acquainted with the most pertinent issues and problems in Lateglacial prehistory, and also with the current state of research.