Reindeer Hunters of the Ice Age in Europe: Economy, Ecology, and the Annual Nomadic Cycle

263 Pages·2022·16.933 MB·English

by  Laure Fontana

Laure Fontana
Reindeer
Hunters
of the Ice Age
in Europe
Economy, Ecology, and the Annual
Nomadic Cycle
Reindeer Hunters of the Ice Age in Europe
Laure Fontana
Reindeer Hunters of the Ice
Age in Europe
Economy, Ecology, and the Annual Nomadic
Cycle
Laure Fontana
UMR 7041 ArScAn – Environmental Archaeology
French National Centre for Scientific Research
Nanterre, France
ISBN 978-3-031-06258-2 ISBN 978-3-031-06259-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06259-9
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Foreword
This book by Laure Fontana is a remarkable work, synthesizing over 20 years of her
own research on reindeer in France as well as the work by many other researchers.
It is nothing less than an ambitious attempt to understand the pre-eminent reliance
on reindeer in almost all regions of France from 30,000 to 15,000 years ago, the
reasons for this reliance on reindeer, the causes of variations, the effects on human
mobility patterns, and the implications for cultural life. Its scope is expansive, cov-
ering 10 major regions in France and encompassing 256 faunal assemblages.
Dealing with these research problems has required a multidisciplinary approach
which Fontana has displayed great abilities in dealing with whether paleoclimates,
geography, ethology, biology, ethnography, zooarchaeology, lithic analysis, iso-
topes, or other of the myriad facets germane to the issues she has confronted. In
particular, the biological and ethological aspects of reindeer have proved to be criti-
cal to interpreting the relevance of archaeological remains for understanding broader
questions of exploitation by humans and hunter-gatherer mobility patterns. As
Fontana has capably argued, these are essential foundations for understanding the
Upper Paleolithic societies of the past in France—situated as it is at the far western
end of the Ice Age Eurasian Mammoth steppe. No one has previously attempted
such a sweeping synthesis of these data, and Fontana has demonstrated a truly
impressive command of both data and theory. She must be considered the foremost
authority on reindeer in the Upper Paleolithic, and this is her magnum opus.
Addressing these issues necessitates the presentation and discussion of consider-
able amounts of complex, thick data, but Fontana very capably manages both to
present these data and to interpret the basic trends and make the results intelligible
from more global perspectives. Her use of maps and graphs is especially effective.
In the process of doing so, she convincingly argues that the long-held views of
Upper Paleolithic groups as highly mobile hunter-gatherers intercepting vast herds
of migrating reindeer is largely unfounded, except for one region: the Paris Basin.
In the Massif Central, it is also possible that reindeer and men moved over long
distances but only in winter when they may have traveled farther north towards
Touraine.
v
vi Foreword
Detailed examination of the situation shows that the commonly used ethno-
graphic model of Arctic reindeer hunting is inappropriate for Upper Paleolithic
France south of the Loire River. In its place, the faunal evidence shows that at least
some reindeer remained in the same regions throughout most of the year, if not year
round. Reindeer may have moved relatively short distances, especially where it was
altitudinally advantageous in summer and winter as on the slopes of the Pyrénées,
and she even considers it possible that reindeer may have moved from the Dordogne
and Charente into the neighboring foothills of the Massif Central in the summer.
However, such seasonal travels are viewed as far different from the massive long-
distance migration of reindeer that ethnographically traveled up to 6,000 km
in a year.
Given the poor quality of many of the early, but pivotal, excavations and analy-
ses, a number of Fontana’s results take the form of hypotheses that emerged from
the data, hypotheses that she emphasizes need to be tested with future excavations
and analyses specifically designed to address the key issues identified in this vol-
ume. That being said, some of the trends seem robust enough already that consider-
able confidence can be placed on Fontana’s main conclusions. There will certainly
be room for future discussion of some of her more tentative conclusions, but, above
all, what she has achieved is the establishment of the fundamental problems that
need to be addressed, and she has developed clear methods and an investigative
structure for dealing with these problems. Thus, this will be a foundational work for
anyone dealing with reindeer—or their importance for understanding the French
Upper Paleolithic—for many years to come.
If anything, Fontana has pushed the argument of “sedentary” reindeer popula-
tions to its limit, with occasional hedging of some claims so that while she empha-
sizes the near constant presence of reindeer in some localities like the Dordogne/
Charente, she also acknowledges that there is little evidence for their presence in
this area during summer months and that they could have traveled (but not “migrated”
over long distances) to the adjacent foothills of the Massif Central or the interfluvial
plateaus during the summer, just as the reindeer of the Montagne Noire could have
traveled to higher elevations in the Pyrénées during the summer, and the summer
herds in the Alps, Jura, Lot, and Quercy regions must have moved elsewhere in the
winter. Moreover, while multiple seasons of occupation may be documented for
most regions, none of the regions have good representations of all seasons. Thus,
seasonal movements of reindeer seem likely for most areas. The main issues are the
extent of the movements and the magnitude of the herds involved. There are clearly
some details still to be worked out in modeling these seasonal movements. Still
unresolved is whether the absence of summer campsites in some areas is the result
of people following reindeer to other regions, or whether people stayed in the same
regions during the summer and simply switched to living at open-air campsites with
insubstantial or no shelters and the use of less visible resources such as plants and
smaller game. A notable lacuna in all models is the potentially key seasonal role of
Les Landes which Fontana suggests might have been a wintering ground.
Unfortunately, the acidic soils of this region generally preclude the preservation of
faunal remains.
Foreword vii
As with all landmark books, this volume has developed some fairly robust and
certain conclusions. It has also presented a range of probable interpretations that
still need to be assessed in more detail, and it has raised a number of more specula-
tive ideas or issues that point the way for future investigations. Conclusions that
seem fairly firmly established include: the unique nature of the French Upper
Paleolithic climate and biome within the Mammoth steppe; the long distance mobil-
ity from the southern Paris Basin to the northern Massif Central that does seem to
correspond to the ethnographic Arctic models; the lack of correspondence else-
where between the ethnographic migration and hunting practices in the Arctic to the
situation in France—notably the presence of reindeer during much of the year in a
number of areas south of the Loire; the major difference between more sedentary
winter habitation sites and more mobile summer encampments; the lack of support
for the common notion that all hunter-gatherers in France were small, widely dis-
persed, and highly mobile groups; and the consistent use of the same basic strategy
of non-selective hunting (all ages and both sexes being represented) throughout the
entire Gravettian-Solutrean-Magdalenian sequence in all regions.
Probable conclusions concern a number of areas that were likely used for sum-
mer encampments, but which generally lack documentation of the corresponding
sites (again, very plausibly due to higher mobility, smaller groups, open-air sites
with poor preservation, and less substantial shelter construction). Fontana has also
made a pioneering effort to model aspects of the “antler economy.” Developing a
framework to monitor the procurement, transport, and working of antler in particu-
lar is a daunting undertaking, especially if antler blanks or tools were being used in
exchanges. But Fontana has established a number of very credible initial conclu-
sions, although based on assumptions that may invite further discussions.
Speculative conclusions in this work involve the relative small sizes of band
ranges or territories in the quasi-sedentary regions; a dismissal of the importance of
stored meat; and suggestions of seasonal movements of reindeer (and people) to
higher elevation summer grazing grounds in a number of regions. I would also add
to this list, Fontana’s assumption that local territories and environments in the river
valley bottoms or adjacent plateaus were adequate to support enough reindeer on a
year-round basis to sustain seasonally sedentary groups of hunter-gatherers, proba-
bly numbering from 50 to 100 individuals per group. While this scenario is pre-
sented a number of times in the book, my own impression is that: (1) the relatively
small territories such as proposed by Fontana for the Vézère (and to which the
occurrence of major large sites every few kilometers at major river fording locations
along the river seems to attest) and (2) the areas of the incised river valley bottoms
that could provide winter forage and shelter as well as the areas of the adjacent
plateaus would be unlikely to support enough local reindeer to sustain hunter-
gatherer groups year round. That local reindeer in this region were exploited in all
seasons (except summer) seems incontrovertible, as Fontana has reaffirmed.
However, from my perspective, the exponential increase in population density
that occurred from the Middle Paleolithic to the Upper Paleolithic, as well as the
impressive amounts of time and energy spent in making sculptures, paintings, and
elaborate clothing (1,000 dentalium beads obtained from the coast to decorate the
viii Foreword
clothing of an adolescent boy at La Madeleine, alone) all are unintelligible without
the production of considerable amounts of surplus food, skins, and antler. I doubt
that local reindeer populations within small hunter-gatherer band ranges could pro-
duce these kinds of surpluses, much less support the relatively dense human popula-
tions of these incised valleys which are among the densest anywhere in the Upper
Paleolithic. Indeed, in the compass of ethnographies of hunter-gatherers, these pres-
tige items and seasonal sedentism features would be exceptional without mass sea-
sonal harvests and storage.
Thus, I suspect that the seasonal movements of reindeer (whether over short or
long distances) were being exploited somewhere in the Dordogne and that consider-
able amounts of meat were smoke dried and stored. If this was the case, where are
the bones? From my own ethnographic research among complex hunter/gatherers
on the American Northwest Plateau (with very cold winters and dry Artemisia
steppes) I can state that mass harvests of fish migrating through rivers create mas-
sive amounts of butchering wastes, and the same would probably be true of mass
harvests of animals. In the cases that I have documented in the Interior of British
Columbia, the bones and wastes from butchering were either discarded in rivers or
dumped in specific locations like small, narrow ravines that would be difficult to
find archaeologically. Scrap bone could have also been burned for fuel. The pro-
curement and butchering stations that I observed were completely devoid of bones
from mass procurements, and few bones were taken back to residential locations
because all the meat had been filleted and dried as boneless pieces.
I suspect that this would also have been likely to have occurred at any mass har-
vests of transiting reindeer in the Dordogne where the incised river valleys with
favored fording locations would have been ideally suited for transit ambushes, as
argued some years ago by Randy White. As well, butchering or discard locations on
the floodplain might be deeply buried by glacial outwash or might not be preserved.
Thus, I would suggest that both year-round occasional hunting of reindeer (with
variable portions of carcasses returned to residential sites) and mass harvests of
reindeer in seasonal transits (with few bones returned to residential sites—and an
unknown quantity of antler or marrow bones kept in raised storage locations) may
have taken place in a number of the regions documented by Fontana. Indeed, migra-
tory reindeer were certainly being hunted at a small scale in the Charente region at
Jonzac during the Early Würm. Why would they not have been migrating through
the area in the Upper Paleolithic as well?
What we need in the future to evaluate these different scenarios is a grounded
assessment by wildlife experts of the reindeer carrying capacity of the key valleys
and the exploitation areas around major sites including their adjacent uplands. This
is certainly one of the discussions that will continue into the future. This will also
require the modeling of storage behavior and taphonomic processes in much more
detail. The issue of storage is complex, but it can be addressed via proxy indicators
like estimating the number of reindeer killed in a single event; examining bones for
filleting cut marks; documenting human skeletal evidence for vitamin A and D defi-
ciencies stemming from low fat consumption; and by estimating the magnitude of
surpluses required for creating or obtaining prestige objects as attempted in my
Foreword ix
recent Current Anthropology article (see Hayden B 2020 Archaeological pitfalls of
storage. Current Anthropology 61:763–793). The evidence of extreme vitamin A
and D deficiencies in Upper Paleolithic children is particularly interesting since
Neandertal children show little to no such deficiencies, implying that they con-
sumed adequate amounts of fats whereas Upper Paleolithic children did not (see
Skinner MF 2000 A re-evaluation of localized hypoplasia of the primary canine as
a marker of craniofacial osteopenia in European Upper Paleolithic infants. Acta
Univ Carol Med 41: 41–58). There are few ways to explain such different diets
unless Neandertal children were eating fresh kills on a regular basis (and there is
virtually no evidence for storage in the Middle Paleolithic) whereas Upper
Paleolithic children would have had to subsist for long periods on dried meat fillets
from which the fats had been largely removed in the slow drying process over fires
the way they were traditionally prepared on the American Northwest Plateau.
Taking all the above lines of evidence into consideration should result in an improved
assessment of the importance of food storage in the Upper Paleolithic.
In the last section of this book, Fontana briefly addresses the potential symbolic
role of reindeer and their antlers in Upper Paleolithic societies. This is also an
intriguing outcome of her analysis that merits future exploration. One of the most
striking incidences from her corpus of assemblages is the Salle du Fond in the cave
of Enlène. This small salle is almost 150 meters from the cave entrance and is in
total darkness. Yet, from this salle, excavators recovered 336 half-round antler
baguettes and 245 antler projectile points. It is inconceivable to me that this salle
was occupied as a residence since it is so far from the entrance and is in total obscu-
rity. Moreover, the rest of the cave abundantly attests to ritual uses. Why, indeed,
were all these antler items brought so far into this cave? Storage? Ritual exchange?
Ritual payments? The question is intriguing, and raises the issue of why so many
were also recovered at La Vache (1,750 projectile points, 196 half-round baguettes,
plus 128 antler tubes, 304 harpoons, 243 needles, and 25 bâtons percés), and at what
depth in that cave they were recovered from. These observations raise the question
of whether antler may have been a highly valued and symbolic material—and
whether objects made from it were even more valued and symbolic.
In this unparalleled study, Laure Fontana has raised all these and many other
issues and blazed many analytical trails that should provide zooarchaeologists with
guideposts for several generations. It will be a key reference for many years to come.
Archaeology Department Brian Hayden
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
Anthropology Department
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Preface: From the Whole to the Parts, from the
Parts to the Whole
When I opened the first box of faunal remains from the Gazel cave in 1995, as part
of my Ph D work on the Magdalenian of the Montagne Noire, I did not know where
their study would lead me, as I had only a rough idea of the analytical potential of
these bone and tooth fragments. I knew that the data produced would allow me to
answer certain questions related to the exploitation of animal resources, but I did not
know that these results would generate a new series of questions and define the
scope of my future research. This work allowed me to explore all the potential of
micro-regional scale analysis, as well as the special importance of reindeer antlers,
which encouraged me to conceive a research focus linked to the economy of animal
resources and the annual nomadic cycle of human groups. While studying faunal
assemblages from the Upper Palaeolithic of the Massif Central, by the greatest of
coincidences, I was able to evaluate the role of the lithic resource economy in my
research perspective and it was in this area of France that I tried to develop a sys-
temic and integrated approach to the economic system, habitat and the annual cycle
of nomadism. My studies in the Southwest – which are still ongoing – enabled me
to understand that the importance of the reindeer in Upper Palaeolithic societies in
France was linked, above all, to its ethology and ecology. I was therefore gradually
led to perceive certain differences in the exploitation of animal resources and in set-
tlement patterns, between the Montagne Noire, the Massif Central, the Southwest
and other regions studied by my colleagues, such as the Paris Basin or Moravia
(Czech Republic). I then refined this comparison, which led me to other questions,
such as the mobility of reindeer and the environment of the Pleniglacial and
Tardiglacial in France, which seemed to me to be partly distinct from the rest of
Europe. Thus, after studying different types of occupations from different periods
and regions, I defined a global approach integrating the economic system, the annual
nomadic cycle, the environment and the ethology of the reindeer, in order to work
on the scale of the whole of France for the coldest period of the Upper Palaeolithic.
I chose to characterise the parameters of the reindeer economy, by analysing all the
published assemblages from French sites, spanning the Gravettian to the
Magdalenian, in the light of my questions. What I have discovered has not only
allowed me to confirm certain data but to synthesise them. This work produced new
xi