Introduction Settlements, dwellings, pits, and middens – still very far from a theory of everything! (original) (raw)

2021, Foraging Assemblages Volume 1 Edited by Dušan Borić, Dragana Antonović, and Bojana Mihailović

Settlements constitute the category of archaeological sites that most directly reflects the daily life of prehistoric people, as is possible to see from the 15 chapters in this section covering most of Europe – from the Portuguese Atlantic Coast to the Volga Basin in the Russian Plains to central and northern Europe. Remains of hunter‐gatherer settlements can include substantial dwelling structures, such as those documented by Marchand and Dupont for the Beg-er-Vil in French Brittany, Milner et al. for Star Carr, the case of the Motala area in Sweden by Westermark, or Sømmevågen by Meling et al., all in the present volume. These were obviously intended for longer habitation in the same place. In other instances, with good organic preservation, as in the cases presented by Grøn and Peeters in the present volume, settlements can even consist of ephemeral sleeping mats with a hearth, a few nutshells and pieces of flint, and nothing else, probably resulting from a single night’s stay. Internally, settlements can be organized in accordance with strict spatial patterns, indicating a range of contemporaneous elements, or, in a worst-case scenario, they can consist of a palimpsest of numerous overlapping settlement events with a complicated chronology, which can be impossible to disentangle archaeologically.