New book chronicle

Antiquity, June, 2008 by Madeleine Hummler

Piles of animals, smaller piles of records from the 1920s to 1940s, revisited: three reports on three sites, seminal for the recognition of the antiquity of humans in North America, showcase new investigative methods and techniques to further our understanding of human-animal interaction in the dying days of the Pleistocene and the early days of the Holocene. These same techniques are applied to another kill site, this time much older and ascribed to the activities of Neanderthal hunters on the north European plain at Zwolen. Time spent in the company of the prehistoric megafauna provides an excuse to look at the depiction of these animals, and others, in the caves of western Europe. The second part of this chronicle deals with prehistoric landscapes in and around the European North Sea and northern Europe.

Hunters and their prey, in the flesh and in art

DAVID J. MELTZER. Folsom: new archaeological investigations of a classic Paleoindian bison kill. xiv 374 pages, 122 illustrations, 68 tables. 2006. Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press; 0-520-24644-6 hardback 35.95 [pounds sterling].

ROBERT H. BRUNSWIG & BONNIE L. PITBLADO (ed.). Frontiers in Colorado Paleoindian archaeology: from the Dent site to the Rocky Mountains. xx 364 pages, 76 illustrations, 29 tables. 2007. Boulder (CO): University Press of Colorado; 978-0-8701890-5 hardback $60.

DOUGLAS B. BAMFORTH (ed.). The Allen Site: a Paleoindian camp in Southwestern Nebraska. xvi 286 pages, 144 illustrations. 2007. Albuquerque (NM): University of New Mexico Press; 978-0-8263-4295-9 hardback $55.

ROMUALD SCHILD (ed.). The killing fields of Zwolen: a Middle Paleolithic kill-butchery-site in central Poland. 248 pages, 134 b&w & colour illustrations, 33 tables. 2006. Warsaw: Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences; 83-8949923-1 hardback.

ADRIAN LISTER & PAUL BAHN with foreword by JEAN M. AUEL. Mammoths: giants of the Ice Age. 192 pages, numerous b&w & colour illustrations. 2007. London: Frances Lincoln; 978-0-7112-2801-6 hardback 19.99 [pounds sterling].

PAUL G. BAHN. Cave art: a guide to the decorated Ice Age caves of Europe. 224 pages, numerous b&w & colour illustrations. 2007. London: Frances Lincoln; 978-0-7112-2655-5 paperback 14.99 [pounds sterling].

PAUL PETTITT, PAUL BAHN, SERGIO RIPOLL & FRANCISCO J. Munoz. Palaeolithic cave art at Creswell Crags in European context, xvi 292 pages, 122 illustrations, 16 colour plates, 16 tables. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 978-0-19-929917-1 hardback 60 [pounds sterling].

Folsom is a bison kill site, dated to around 10 500 cal BE on the edge of the Great Plains in northern New Mexico where remains of bison antiquus were encountered in a 'bonebed' in 1926. Investigations were primarily triggered by the need to provide museums with bison skeletons for display, but the excavations became far more prominent when a projectile point (a fluted or 'Folsom point') was found associated with the bones and 'forever changed American archaeology'. MELTZER'S comprehensive and well illustrated book combines a re-assessment of the 1926-8 data with a report on his own 199799 fieldwork and new analyses of the site's ecology, geology, climate, natural resources, chronology, fauna and lithics. The generous coverage also allows for an expose of Meltzer's research design and an in-depth review of the 'Folsom controversy' (i.e. difficulties in accepting the antiquity of the find in the 1920s, followed by an endorsement by the archaeological elite of the day, eclipsing the achievement of the original discoverers and excavators) which leads to a captivating discussion of spheres of influence in the archaeological profession (pp. 47-8; fig. 2.15) and an excursus into the more recent head-scratching occasioned by Tom Dillehay's discoveries ar Monte Verde in 1997 which showed a much earlier human presence in the southernmost Americas. Meltzer's report starts with an introductory chapter asking 20 questions, reprised at the end (Chapter 9: 'Answered and unanswered questions'). There we learn, for example, that the site was a single encounter kill of bisons (MNI: 32 in the sample) by a group of mobile hunters whose projectile points came from a very wide area and who stayed only briefly ar Folsom before the winter set in. Folsom 'is in many ways an accident of history, in its creation, preservation and history.' The site was 'not especially significant' to the original hunting group, was rapidly buried by alluvium, and later revealed by a flash flood. 'The irony ... is that ... however inconsequential this episode may have been in the lives of the Folsom hunter-gatherers who killed those bison some 10 500 years ago, their actions would have a profound and lasting impact on American archaeology' (p. 307).

Not bison but mammoths is what Frontiers in Colorado Paleoindian archaeology is mostly about, as the Dent site, a little older than Folsom, is the main focus of the collection edited by BRUNSWIG & PITBLADO. The book is in three parts: first context, then Dent, finally recent research elsewhere in Colorado. The central section consists of a review and update of the Dent site, revealed, once again in a flood episode, in 1932 in the north-eastern Colorado plain at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Though badly recorded (p. 89), Dent became a landmark site, as Clovis projectile points were found associated with mammoth bones. New research since 1987 by one of the editors (Brunswig) has established a deposition date for the 'bonebed' around 11 000 BP and that the mammoths (MNI: 14 in the sample) represent accumulated kills in several incidents; oxygen isotope analysis on the teeth confirms that the mammoths were killed at different seasons, probably in ambushes in a gully of the Colorado piedmont; analysis of butchery marks is interpreted as 'serially episodic processing' (p. 178), while phytolith and starch analysis on the teeth suggests that the mammoths had access to a wide range of feeding grounds, eating grasses, conifers and oak. Part 3 showcases new research in climate modelling, an analysis of hearth-centred use of space in the mountains of Colorado (no actual hearth was found), an overview of the archaeology of the southern Rocky Mountains, a typology of late Paleoindian spear points and a retrospect from Wyoming. Frontiers ably shows what new methods can contribute to addressing old questions and illustrates the shift over recent years to mutlidiscplinarity and to studying whole landscapes; in the latter the emphasis is also shifting from the plains to the mountains.