Landscape Section - Conference and AGM 2006
'Migration and Settlement in the Landscape:
a view from the Palaeolithic rivers of central-southern England'
Dr Rob Hosfield, Dept. of Archaeology, School of Human & Environmental Sciences, University of Reading
Abstract
From the perspective of the earliest British Palaeolithic all investigations of landscape occupation and migration are strongly influenced by the fundamental issues of data resolution and chronology. It is only through clarification of these factors that the 'products' of Palaeolithic migration (e.g. changing population histories and the appearance/disappearance of different lithic technological traits) can be explored with confidence.
Although the new evidence from Pakefield indicates an earliest occupation date for the British landmass of c. 700 kya (thousand years ago), the majority of the dates for the first substantial occupation of southern Britain centre around half a million years ago (e.g. the dates from Boxgrove on the Sussex coast). Artefact-bearing deposits of this age (and younger) have been identified in central-southern England (associated with the extant and extinct rivers of Hampshire, Dorset and Wiltshire), and this evidence forms the focus of this paper.
The paper will begin by exploring key factors influencing the hominin occupation of central-southern England during the Middle Pleistocene: including climatically-driven cycles of sea-level change and the role of the English Channel 'seascape', different dates for the breaching of the Dover Straits, and the potential role of major and subsidiary rivers as 'paths and tracks' within Pleistocene landscapes. Of key importance is the palaeogeography of the now-extinct Solent River, and the paper makes reference to recent re-dating (using the optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) technique) of selected terrace deposits.
The paper then focuses on patterns of changing hominin behaviour from the perspective of colonisation and migration: with examples including the modelling of population histories from derived artefact evidence, the potential links between population densities and technological innovations (e.g. of the Levallois technique), and the evidence for differential landscape use. These themes will be explored with specific reference to the lithic artefact evidence recovered from the river terraces of Hampshire and the surrounding regions, and the paper will also focus on methodologies for the interpretation of these predominantly low-resolution data-sets.
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