Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Throughout the text it is apparent that Jochim acknowledges the importance of social factors, and that such considerations cannot be answered solely from ecological criteria ... interpretations offered by Jochim are intriguing. With Jochim's expertise in hunter-gatherer productive economies, he is uniquely qualified to bind together subsistence with social and ideological aspects of the past..." Geoarchaeology, An International Journal
Synopsis
As an archaeologist with primary research and training experience in North American arid lands, I have always found the European Stone Age remote and impenetrable. My initial introduction, during a survey course on world prehis tory, established that (for me, at least) it consisted of more cultures, dates, and named tool types than any undergraduate ought to have to remember. I did not know much, but I knew there were better things I could be doing on a Saturday night. In any event, after that I never seriously entertained any notion of pur suing research on Stone Age Europe-that course was enough for me. That's a pity, too, because Paleolithic Europe-especially in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene-was the scene of revolutionary human adaptive change. Iron ically, all of it was amenable to investigation using precisely the same models and analytical tools I ended up spending the better part of two decades applying in the Great Basin of western North America. Back then, of course, few were thinking about the late Paleolithic or Me solithic in such terms. Typology, classification, and chronology were the order of the day, as the text for my undergraduate course reflected. Jochim evidently bridled less than I at the task of mastering these chronotaxonomic mysteries, yet he was keenly aware of their limitations-in particular, their silence on how individual assemblages might be connected as part of larger regional subsis tence-settlement systems."
Synopsis
In the 1970s and 1980s Jochim did a large amount of important fieldwork on the Palaeolithic of SW Germany. This included excavations at the rockshelter Henauhof-Nordwest (published in German). On the basis of this he produced important models of hunter-gatherer land-use and subsistence. The basis of these models has only ever been published in journal articles... until now. This book brings together the sites Jochim excavated with the larger regions on which their inhabitants relied. The author discuses sites on the landscape' of SW Germany in the Late Palaeolithic, Early Mesolithic and Late Mesolithic and then, in a concluding chapter, puts SW Germany in the context of Western Europe at the end of the Ice Age.
Table of Contents
1.Introduction. 2.The Changing Theoretical Landscape. 3.The Natural Landscape. 4.Sites on the Landscape: The Late Paleolithic. 5.Sites on the Landscape: The Early Mesolithic. 6.Sites on the Landscape: The Late Mesolithic. 7.Sites on the Landscape: Survey. 8.Sites on the Landscape: Nenauhof Nordwest. 9.Change through Time at Henauhof Nordwest. 10.Sites on the Landscape: Henauhof West. 11.Sites on the Landscape: 12.Henauhof Nordwest 2 Henauhof and the Federsee in the Regional Landscape. 13.The Late Paleolithic Landscape. 14.The Early Mesolithic Landscape. 15.The Late Mesolithic Landscape. 16.Southwest Germany in the West European Landscape. Index.