Kathleen Sterling & Sébastien Lacombe
Anthropology
Binghamton University
Late Pleistocene Hunter-Gatherers: new insights from research in southwestern France
April 7, 2014
Academic Building A G008, 5:00 PM
Abstract
Our knowledge of late Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe has come almost exclusively from cave contexts, though most researchers believe that cave sites form only a part of the prehistory of the region. This is starting to change with research in open-air contexts. By comparing new data from regional survey and open-air excavation with what we already know from caves we can create a more complicated picture of life at the end of the Pleistocene as well as question the conventional wisdom about the evolution of technology at the end of the Paleolithic into the Neolithic.
Biography
Sébastien Lacombe is a Research Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University. His research interests are in the Paleolithic of the Old World, the archaeology of decorated caves, the prehistory of North America, archaeopetrography and cultural resource management. He focuses on lithic technology and rock material sourcing, particularly exploring the socio-economic organization of prehistoric groups in relation to natural resources and landscape, as well as the symbolic aspects that often lie underneath. He has carried out most of his field work in Southwestern Europe (especially in France), but also in Central America and Central Asia (where he directed the excavation of the Early Upper Paleolithic site of Dörölj II). He is currently co-directing the excavation of Peyre Blanque, a late Pleistocene (Magdalenian) open-air settlement in the French Pyrenees.
Kathleen Sterling is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University. Her research is centered in the French Pyrenees, where she is currently co-director of Peyre Blanque, an open-air late Paleolithic site. Her interests include lithic technology, learning and identity, communities of practice, Paleolithic visual imagery, hunting and gathering groups, gender and feminist science, Black feminist theory, landscape archaeology, and the sociopolitics of archaeology. The main themes of her work are concerned with dispelling myths about human ancestors as violent, primitive, and limited. She is also concerned with equal opportunity in anthropology and science in general, particularly in the ways in which this has an impact on knowledge production. She is a member of the Committee on the Status of Women in Archaeology, the Society of Black Archaeologists, the Association for Feminist Anthropology, and the Association of Black Anthropologists.
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