De la mobilité au Paléolithique supérieur : entre archéologie et ethnographie

Abstract

Can group mobility during the Upper Paleolithic be considered a form of nomadism? To answer this question, we must recognize that the archaeological record, invariably an altered picture of what was originally deposited by people, provides only limited access to prehistoric behavior. By also using ethnography, we can have a better understanding of the reality of a nomadic camp under periglacial conditions and evaluate if archaeologically-known campsites show similar material characteristics to ethnographic examples under similar environmental constraints. Whether they occupied caves and rock shelters or installed themselves in open air localities with protectives structures, Upper Paleolithic people typically inhabited spaces for short periods of time, because the groups themselves were moving according to vegetation cycles, ethology of animals, the accessibility of myriad raw materials, etc. If we work to identify Paleolithic group movements based simply on seasonality, we are essentially examining specific and limited moments in time and space. Still, it appears that people occupied spaces as if they were concentric circles. At the center was the core of the habitation, the material expression of the occupying social unit and the domain of women. Around these core units were private spaces associated with individual social groups and community spaces including areas used particularly by men. Surrounding the camp proper were the regions exploited by the group during their stay at the encampment. Finally, further beyond was the territory ranged by the people over the course of the seasons as they sought and exploited the resources that sustained them.Dependence on those elements of the environment that people exploited to survive required flexibility in human social organization and especially in the periodic aggregations and dispersals, small and large, of people. The distribution of gendered activities, which concerned as much the acquisition of food as the productive organization of daily life, was reflected in the spatial structure of habitation localities into female and male activity zones. Numerous criteria display the status and needs of individuals as much as that of social units.To survive in Pleistocene conditions, a vast array of knowledge was required, in particular in order to evaluate the relationship between time and environment and to exploit it. If there is technical versatility among individuals, variation in competencies produced by differential learning, this can be expressed by individuals in appropriate contexts. Thus structured, each family, the basic socio-economic unit, can find or fabricate all the implements necessary to live. Finally, ritual and symbolic practices permit humans to believe they exert a sort of control over their futures.We are comfortable with the idea of nomadism. But because we know archaeologically of halts in movement of short duration and of longer term, we cannot say if the norm during the Upper Paleolithic was a strict nomadism, with human groups making continual short pauses as they moved across the landscape, or a quasi-nomadism with long stops of several months at a time, during which the mobility of certain persons within the community was increased as they moved off from the main group to perform specific tasks in specific locations, followed by increased group mobility at other times of the year. The site of Pincevent allows us to illustrate this approach to prehistoric nomadism, as it exhibits evidence for several autumnal visits of short duration and for a winter occupation of long duration.