Catching a glimpse of mesolithic settlement patterns and site re-occupation through lithic refitting, raw material characterizations and absolute dating

Contemporaneity of spatially distinct activity areas at prehistoric sites is often inferred based on lithic refit connections alone. These connections are, in addition, only rarely discussed in detail, nor are they explicitly subjected to any form of critical assessment. In this paper, we present a combined use of Bayesian modeling of C-14-dates, raw material characterizations and lithic refitting to investigate the occurrence of interconnected artefact clusters at the Belgian Mesolithic site of Kerkhove. Besides this, a set of parameters is presented that is employed to control the reliabilit... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Vandendriessche, Hans
Van Maldegem, Elliot
Crombé, Philippe
Dokumenttyp: journalarticle
Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
Schlagwörter: History and Archaeology / Spatial organization / Early Mesolithic / Refit methodology / C-14-dating / Bayesian analysis / PLEISTOCENE-HOLOCENE TRANSITION / LAND-USE / BELGIUM / ARCHAEOLOGY / SCHELDT / SIZE
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-27369104
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8750439

Contemporaneity of spatially distinct activity areas at prehistoric sites is often inferred based on lithic refit connections alone. These connections are, in addition, only rarely discussed in detail, nor are they explicitly subjected to any form of critical assessment. In this paper, we present a combined use of Bayesian modeling of C-14-dates, raw material characterizations and lithic refitting to investigate the occurrence of interconnected artefact clusters at the Belgian Mesolithic site of Kerkhove. Besides this, a set of parameters is presented that is employed to control the reliability of the refit connections. The three proxies applied in this paper suggest that the Early Mesolithic occupation of the site was organized as two diachronic and more or less parallel alignments of artefact clusters. Based on the lithic refitting results, two scenarios can be considered to explain the formation histories of these linear arrangements. The individual artefact clusters incorporated within them were either occupied in a strictly contemporaneous manner or in a (partly) sequential manner.