Thanks for joining us at this website about Paleolithic archaeology in France, and in particular, about the site of Pech de l'Azé IV, which was inhabited by Neandertals some tens of thousands of years ago during the Ice Ages. We hope you enjoy our videos and other graphics, as well as our descriptions, of this type of research.
Acknowledgements
Funding for the Pech de l'Azé IV excavation has come from The Leakey Foundation, National Science Foundation (award 0073856), The University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Funding for the preparation of this website was provided by the National Science Foundation, Informal Science Education Program. We wish to thank Orrin Shane and John Yellen for their help.
Neandertals lived in Europe between about 150,000 to 30,000 years ago and their archaeological record is best known from different cave and rockshelter sites. One of these is Pech de l'Azé IV in southern France. It was initially test excavated in the 1950s and later in the 1970s by French prehistorians, who established the general sequence of occupations at the site, as well as describing the various types of stone tool assemblages found in the different layers. We decided to return to this site for more extensive excavations for several reasons. These include the fact that the lowest deposits in the sequence contain many hearths, an uncommon finding at a Neandertal site. There is also a very special stone tool assemblage (the Asinipodian) featuring extremely small stone artifacts in one of the layers. The sophisticated technology available today additionally meant that we could excavate the site and understand its formation over time with a far greater precision than was available to the excavators in the 1950s and 1970s.
• 1. Overview
• 2. Background
• 3. Preliminary Work
• 4. The Mousterian at Pech
• 5. The Living Floors
• 6. The XYZ Layers
• 7. The Asinipodian at Pech
• 8. Conclusions
Paleolithic archaeologists study the evidence from archaeological sites of the "Old Stone Age." This record of human antiquity stretches back over 2.5 million years and the most common type of cultural material that we find is stone tools. These artifacts are thus one of our most important lines of evidence for understanding the behavior of peoples of the remote past, along with the bones of animals they ate, and the occasional finds of the fossilized bones of these early individuals. What archaeologists do is find sites through survey, choose sites with good excavation (digging) and recovery potential for data relevant to research questions about the past, and excavate these sites using detailed methods of recording the precise spatial location of all stone artifacts, bones, features such as hearths, samples of sediment for environmental and geological studies, and samples for dating the site.
Archaeologists reconstruct past behaviors and the processes of site formation at excavated sites using a wide variety of methodologies. Some have remained essentially unchanged for many years, such as careful excavation with small, hand-held tools. Other methods, however, have benefited from major technological improvements. Rather than measuring in each stone artifact or animal bone with a handheld ruler or tape measure, for example, archaeologists can now use a total station that measures spatial positioning with pinpoint accuracy. Other advances include computer programs that can nearly instantaneously create maps from database information, showing the position of each recovered item, and data entry programs that decrease the potential for erroneous information such as spelling errors or transposed numbers which often occur when each entry has to be individually typed into a computer database. New methodologies have also been developed that allow us to determine the age of a site that lies in the interval between 45,000 to 500,000 years ago, including the period of the Neandertals.