Grave Markers - Middle and Early Upper Paleolithic Burials and the Use of Chronotypology in...

8/14/2019 Grave Markers - Middle and Early Upper Paleolithic Burials and the Use of Chronotypology in Contemporary Paleolithic Research

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C u r r e n t A n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 42, Number 4, AugustOctober 2001 2001 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2001/4204-0001$3.00

Grave Markers

Middle and Early UpperPaleolithic Burials and the Useof Chronotypology inContemporary PaleolithicResearch1

by Julien Riel-Salvatore andGeoffrey A. Clark

Comparison of mortuary data from the Middle and Early UpperPaleolithic archaeological record shows that, contrary to previousassessments, there is much evidence for continuity between thetwo periods. This suggests that if R. H. Gargetts critique of al-leged Middle Paleolithic burials is to be given credence, it shouldalso be applied to the burials of the Early Upper Paleolithic.Evidence for continuity reinforces conclusions derived fromlithic and faunal analyses and site locations that the Upper Pale-olithic as a reified category masks much variation in the archae-ological record and is therefore not an appropriate analytical tool.Dividing the Upper Paleolithic into Early and Late phases mightbe helpful for understanding the cultural and biological processesat work.

j u l i e n r i e l - s a l v a t o r e is currently a graduate research fel-low at the Archaeological Research Institute, Department of An-thropology, Arizona State University (Tempe, Ariz. 85287-2402,U.S.A. [[email protected]]). Born in 1977, he was educated at Mc-Gill University (B.A., Honours, 1999) and at Arizona State Uni-versity (M.A., 2001). He has conducted fieldwork in Spain and It-aly, and his research interests include the symbolic capacities ofEurasian Paleolithic hominids, lithic technology and classifica-tion, rock art, and research frameworks and traditions.

g e o f f r e y a . c l a r k is Distinguished Research Professor ofAnthropology at Arizona State University. Born in 1944, he waseducated at the University of Arizona (B.A., 1966; M.A., 1967)and the University of Chicago (Ph.D., 1971). His recentpublications deal with the logic of inference in modern-human-origins research (e.g., with John Lindly, Modern Human Origins

in the Levant and Western Asia, American Anthropologist 91:96285, and Symbolism and Modern Human Origins, currentanthropology 31:23361) and applications of neo-Darwinian ev-olutionary theory in archaeology and human paleontology (e.g.,with coeditor Mike Barton, Rediscovering Darwin [Washington,D.C.: American Anthropological Association, 1997]).

The present paper was submitted 20 iii 00 and accepted 2 i 01.

1. We are grateful to many friends and colleagues for helping usbring this work to fruition. We thank Bill Kimbel (Institute of Hu-man Origins, Arizona State University) for incisive comments onan earlier draft; we have tried to incorporate his suggestions when-ever possible. We also acknowledge the useful remarks of two anon-

Since it was recognized in the early 20th century thatUpper Paleolithic humans buried their dead (Defleur1993:1718), debate has raged over whether the practicealso existed in the Middle Paleolithic. Although oftenimplicit, this controversy is linked to perceptions of the

respective cognitive capacities of Middle and Upper Pa-leolithic hominids and thus deeply imbedded in the con-troversy over the origins of modern humans. Althoughmany archaeologists and physical anthropologists work-ing with Paleolithic material have come to accept theexistence of Middle Paleolithic burials, their meaning inbehavioral terms is still much discussed (Chase and Dib-ble 1987, Hayden 1993).

In 1989, Robert Gargett proposed that all of what hadtypically been accepted as evidence of Middle Paleolithicburials could be explained in terms of natural processes.For him, burials first appeared in the Upper Paleolithic,presumably as part of a symbolic explosion heralding

modern behavior claimed by some archaeologists to havetaken place at the MiddleUpper Paleolithic transition,roughly 35,000 years b.p. (see, e.g., White 1989a, b). Al-though his view was met with much skepticism (e.g.,Belfer-Cohen and Hovers 1992, Hayden 1993, Defleur1993, Gargett 1989, Louwe Kooijmans et al. 1989), Gar-gett has recently published another paper on the issue(1999). In this latest salvo he attributes more cases, in-cluding some recent ones that were excavated more sci-entifically, to natural depositional and taphonomicprocesses.

While his call for a more rigorous examination of al-ternative explanations for Middle Paleolithic burials is

welcome, we suggest that his view is too extreme. Belfer-Cohen and Hovers (1992) have convincingly argued thatif Gargetts criteria for Middle Paleolithic burials wereto be applied to the Natufian burials of the Near East,we would still fall short of conclusive evidence of pur-poseful burial in that region. This suggests that Gargettis selective in the application of his principlesan ap-proach that he never adequately justifies. We argue herethat the only way in which his approach could be jus-tified would be to submit the earliest, if not all, UpperPaleolithic burials to the same critical scrutiny. We pro-pose to test some of the implications of Gargetts posi-tion by comparing the Middle Paleolithic evidence withthat for the Early Upper Paleolithic. If, as Gargett (1999:

30) argues, burial practices developed only in the UpperPaleolithic, no Upper Paleolithic burials from any periodshould share any significant patterns with putative bur-ials from the Middle Paleolithic.

ymous referees. Filippo Salvatore (Concordia University) and SteveSchmich (Arizona State University) read earlier versions of theman-uscript and provided useful comments. We thank Alexandra deSousa (George Washington University) for stimulating discussionson the nature of Paleolithic burial, the subject of her B.A. honorsthesis at Arizona State University. We are, of course, responsiblefor all errors of fact or omission.


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450 F c u r r e n t a n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 42, Number 4, AugustOctober 2001

The Question of the Early Upper Paleolithic

Recent work in various areas of the Old World has pro-vided scholars with hard evidence that what is ofteninterpreted as typically Middle Paleolithic behavior, no-tably subsistence strategies and tool making, shifted totypically Upper Paleolithic patterns only after about20,000 years ago (Lindly and Clark 1990, Duff, Clark,and Chadderdon 1992, Stiner 1994, Kuhn 1995). In fact,observable patterns often show a great deal of continuityacross cultures and over time (Clark 1992). Recentclaims of a possible Neanderthal/Homo sapiens sapienshybrid dating to the latter part of the Early Upper Pa-leolithic (Duarte et al. 1999, Trinkaus, Zilhao, andDuarte 1999) also suggest that the simplistic equationof cultures with hominid types, a correlate of tradi-tional interpretive frameworks of Paleolithic research, isseriously flawed and probably counterproductive for anunderstanding of the transition.

Recognition of distinct Early and Late Upper Paleo-lithic periods has not been unanimously accepted. Somescholars have insisted that the Upper Paleolithic is acoherent temporal and cultural unit (see White 1989band various papers in Knecht, Pike-Tay, and White 1993).This period, they claim, was associated exclusively withmodern humans and a very few acculturated Neander-thals and was defined by an unmistakable symbolic ex-plosion that included as a single package art,symbolism(including burials), bone and antler technology, complexsocial structures, and perhaps even language (Noble andDavidson 1991, 1993, 1996). This point of view, whichignores much of the evidence for Middle Paleolithic sym-bolism (e.g., Marshack 1989), agrees well with Gargettsperception of the differences between the Middle and theUpper Paleolithic. Indeed, his view effectively dehu-manizes Neanderthals and implies that they were, forall intents and purposes, evolutionary dead ends.

Both positions, however, appear to accept that culturaldiversity intensified in the course of the Upper Paleo-lithic. This being the case, we can assume that the ear-liest phases of that chronotypologically defined periodwould be characterized by simpler forms of the samebehavior found in its later phases. Thus, if we are to takesome fraction of the Upper Paleolithic as a basis for po-tential behavioral comparisons with the Middle Paleo-lithic, it appears sensible to take the allegedly behavior-

ally incipient portion of that period as that baseline.The first three Upper Paleolithic technocomplexes(Chatelperronian, Aurignacian, and Gravettian) will bethe ones characterized by the earliest and presumablysimplest manifestations of symbolic behavior, includingpurposeful burial. If Gargett is right and intentional in-terment begins only with the earliest Upper Paleolithic,the patterns derived from this limited sample shouldshow no qualitative similarities whatsoever to those de-rived from a sample of alleged graves from the MiddlePaleolithic.

By trying to discern how burial practices in the EarlyUpper Paleolithic differed from or resembled those sug-

gested for the Middle Paleolithic, this paper will also testthe validity of the Upper Paleolithic as an analytical unit,since it will show whether an unambiguous Middle/Up-per Paleolithic division exists in a body of evidence otherthan stone tools. By extension, the validity of typologicaland etic approaches to the dynamic cultural and biolog-ical processes of the Paleolithic will also be assessed.

Burials and Modern Human Origins

Almost everyone involved in modern-human-origins re-search accepts that humans had started to burytheir deadby the earliest phases of the Upper Paleolithic. The issuebefore us, then, is whether purposeful burial also existedin the Middle Paleolithic.

One group of researchers, spearheaded by Gargett(1989, 1996, 1999), argues that geological or nonhumannatural processes alone can account for all apparent Mid-dle Paleolithic hominid burials recovered so far. Thisimplies that they view Upper Paleolithic graves in gen-eral as radically different from all the material claimedin support of intentional burial in the Middle Paleolithic.A major difficulty with this point of view is the unlike-lihood that the geological processes at work in MiddlePaleolithic sites would not also have affected those ofthe Upper Paleolithic. The presence of proportionallygreater numbers of Upper Paleolithic graves should beperfectly explicable by such processes. Indeed, besidesthe fact that Early Upper Paleolithic sites were morenumerous and widespread than Middle Paleolithic ones(White 1985:57), bodies buried 100,000 years ago aremuch less likely to have been preserved to the presentthan those buried a mere 25,000 years ago. This per-spective suggests that modern humans, who were, afterall, present for most of the Middle Paleolithic,eventuallycrossed some kind of cognitive threshold beyond thereach of the symbolically challenged Neanderthals,who were destined to be replaced. It is not surprising,therefore, to see proponents of this interpretation invok-ing the extreme replacement scenario of Stringer(Stringer, Hublin, and Vandermeersch 1984, Stringer andAndrews 1988; but cf. Clark and Willermet 1995) andMellars (1989, 1996; but cf. Clark and Lindly 1989a,Clark 1997b).

Another group of researchers accepts the existence ofMiddle Paleolithic graves but sees them as different from

those of the Upper Paleolithic. Chase and Dibble (1987;Chase 1991) argue that Middle Paleolithic burial is ev-idence of a level of caring and emotional attachment wellabove that of any other higher primates but that thereare no other obvious signs of ritual (Chase and Dibble1987:276). In other words, Middle Paleolithic hominidswere gregarious, emotional, socially complex, and adeptat hunting but had no ritual or symbolic behavior toorganize their sociality. (Exactly how emotion is de-tached from humanness is never made clear.) This po-sition has the notable advantage of being able to accountfor the very limited number of apparent graves recoveredfrom Middle Paleolithic contexts, since it implies that


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r i e l - s a l v a t o r e a n d c l a r k Grave Markers F 451

burial was not a regular part of the Neanderthal behav-ioral repertoire and was, therefore, likely to have beensporadic. It is handicapped, however, by evidence thatMiddle Paleolithic modern humans also sporadicallyburied their dead for no symbolic reason. This observa-tion can be interpreted as suggesting that modern hu-mans and Neanderthals were the same species andshared a behavioral repertoirea view that is supportedby lithic (Boeda 1988) and faunal (Chase 1989) evidencestrongly suggesting that the two hominids had similarlifeways for an interval of at least 60,000 years (Lindlyand Clark 1990). The alternative interpretation preferredby Chase and Dibble (1987:285) is that Neanderthals andmodern humans were two distinct species and that onlymodern humans would eventually develop the capacityfor symbolic behavior, or neoculture, giving them acompetitive advantage over paleocultural Neander-thals, who were driven to extinction. Despite a lack ofconcrete evidence, most of the proponents of the non-symbolic-burial interpretation adhere to this view.

Others in this group see both kinds of Middle Paleo-lithic hominids as having the capacity for symbolic be-havior, but what this means is debated. Some researchersargue that despite their ability to act symbolically, Ne-anderthals apparently never refined this capacity tothe same degree as modern humans and were thereforecondemned to be replaced by them (Defleur 1993; Mel-lars 1996). A broadly similar expression of this viewbased on the analysis of stone and bone tools and per-sonal ornaments has recently been proposed by someEuropean workers (dErrico et al. 1998, Zilhao anddErrico 1999a; see Clark 1997a, 1999a). Others argue,however, that the embryonic ritual behavior embodiedin burials postdating 100,000 years b.p. provides supportfor the hypothesis that the two hominid groups weresimply regional variants within a single, wide-ranging,polytypic species (Brose and Wolpoff 1971, Wolpoff, Wu,and Thorne 1984, Clark and Lindly 1989a, Wolpoff 1989).In their view, the Middle Paleolithic archaeological rec-ord provides evidence of a fair degree of socialcomplexitythat increased at a different rate from that of biologicalevolution (Marshack 1989, Hayden 1993). May (1986:157, translation ours)2 sums up this position when shestates that the Upper Paleolithic is in continuity withthe Middle Paleolithic, developing further what it con-tained in germinal form. . . . It is the very principle ofevolution. This position has the advantage of being able

to indicate some of the elements that should or couldbe found in Early Upper Paleolithic burials, thereby pro-viding the test implications for Early Upper Paleolithicburial that the other approaches have studiously avoided.

In fact, the multiregional hypothesis predicts that ex-tremely robust modern humans showing some Nean-derthal features will be the earliest buried hominids ofthe Upper Paleolithic. It happens that many of the ear-liest recovered hominids from the Upper Paleolithic

2. Le Paleolithique superieur est en continuite avec le Paleoli-thique moyen, developpe ce quil contenait en germe. . . . Cest leprincipe meme de levolution.

have, in fact, been described as very robust and showingNeanderthal affinities (see Wolfpoff 1997:74658; 1999:76169). The problem is that it is impossible to comparethem with Neanderthals as a whole because, despiteclaims to the contrary (see Stringer, Hublin, and Van-dermeersch 1984), we do not have a list of traits thatunambiguously characterizes Upper Pleistocene homi-nids as Neanderthal or modern (Willermet 1993, Willer-met and Clark 1995, Clark 1997a). This renders the clas-sification of limitrophe specimens difficult if notimpossible, resulting in a conceptual impasse in whichplayers from multiregional and replacement camps citethe same evidence but interpret it differently. It is in-teresting, however, that the robust modern humans pre-sent in the earliest Upper Paleolithic (see descriptions ofCombe Capelle, Les Cottes, and Predmost in May 1986)are precisely what is expected by continuity advocatesand can be accommodated only with difficulty by thereplacement model. The recently discovered Lagar VelhoNeanderthal/modern hybrid (Duarte et al. 1999, Trin-kaus, Zilhao, and Duarte 1999) is another aberrationthat can be explained more adequately from a continuitythan from a replacement perspective (but see Brauer1984, 1989).

We take the position that burials are crucial for un-derstanding both the biological and the cultural transi-tion and that, like stone tools, they can serve as impor-tant sources of information about the origins of what isseen as typically modern behavior. As with stone tools,however, it is quite unwarranted to link burials withspecific hominid taxa. It is very unlikely that intermentwas the only way our Paleolithic forebears had of dis-posing of the dead (Ucko 1969), and their mortuary prac-tices may not always have left traces in the archaeolog-ical record (e.g., Le Mort 1988). Therefore, while burialscan certainly be used as a source of evidence in inferringpast lifeways, if we are ever to resolve the issues sur-rounding our origins they cannot be studied in isolationfrom other lines of evidence (e.g., tool technologies, set-tlement and subsistence patterns, etc.).

Some Comments on Burial Analysis

In analyzing mortuary data, regularities or patterns mustbe identified in grave contexts. Following Binford (1971),patterns in the mortuary record can be assumed to reflect

some of the various social personae (statuses occupiedor activated in life) of the deceased (see also Clark andNeeley 1987). This suggests that, if we can control fortaphonomy and diagenesis, at least some of the patternsin the Middle and Early Upper Paleolithic record couldrepresent or index the social personae recognized by thesocieties in which purposefully interred individuals onceparticipated. As is pointed out by Harrold (1980:196),however, this approach is based on cross-cultural obser-vations derived from fully modern populations that typ-ically use formal cemeteries to dispose of their dead.Paleolithic burials are much fewer and much morewidely distributed in space and time than those of any


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anthropological culture. We may also be dealing withtwo different species (or, more likely, populations of thesame species), with the result that anthropologically de-rived principles are probably not applicable to the periodunder scrutiny. Therefore, while patterns may be visiblein the mortuary record of the later phases of the Paleo-lithic, one must be extremely careful in interpretingthem and wary of generalizing them to archaeologicallydefined analytical units, which are by definition fairlystatic and of very long duration and therefore quite dif-ferent from cultures in the purely anthropological senseof the term (Clark 1997a).

Selection of Data

The geographical area under scrutiny consists of most ofWestern Eurasia and Western Russia, that is, the wholearea in which typologically defined Middle and UpperPaleolithic tool assemblages have been identified. Thisis an area of several million square kilometers. Althoughmany sites there have yielded human remains, onlythose considered to have been purposefully buried areexamined here.

One of Gargetts major criticisms of research on Mid-dle Paleolithic burials is that the mere presence of anarticulated skeleton in an archaeological context is oftentaken as evidence for purposeful burial (1989:16061;1999:3133, 4142). This criticism is a valid one. Al-though is it true that skeletons are rarely so preserved(1989:15758), nonhuman processes can and sometimesdo result in the preservation of articulated skeletal parts.Many researchers (May 1986, Smirnov 1989, Defleur1993) do in fact start their analyses of Middle Paleolithicburials with the presumption that an articulated skele-ton represents intentional burial (but see Vandermeersch1993 for an alternative approach). All agree, however,that an articulated skeleton by itself is never sufficientevidence of a burial.

A common solution is to look for other elements thatmay indicate purposeful interment. These include a skel-etons position, the presence of a pit or some other typeof burial structure, and the presence of gravegoodsobjects unambiguously associated with the re-mains and therefore assumed to have been intentionallyplaced in a grave (Defleur 1993:5758). As concerns theidentification of burial inclusions as grave goods in

Middle Paleolithic contexts, we refer the reader to De-fleurs (1993) thorough and competent discussion of thematter and to the original sources in which they werereported as such in recently discovered burials (i.e., De-deriyeh 1 [Akazawa et al. 1995] and Amud 7 [Hovers etal. 1995, Hovers, Kimbel, and Rak 2000, Rak, Kimbel,and Hovers 1994]). May (1986:4) also suggests that at-tention be paid to the total area in which the remainsare found, and Smirnov (1989:216) proposes that the pres-ence of associated features be taken into account. Whenone or more of these elements co-occurs with an artic-ulated skeleton, it seems likely that we are dealing witha purposeful inhumation.

Technically, the number of supposed Middle Paleo-lithic burials included in this study should be of no im-portance, since, if they do not carry a symbolic loading,they should not show any patterns similar to those de-rived from Early Upper Paleolithic burials (Gargett 1999:30). Nevertheless, we classified the apparent Middle Pa-leolithic burials as certain, probable, or possible(Defleur 1993) and omitted the possible burials fromour sample. When possible, reference was also made tothe original publications for the older sites reviewed byDefleur (e.g., Solecki 1971; Heim 1976, 1982) to increasethe accuracy of our interpretations. Additional data fromrecently discovered Middle Paleolithic burials were gath-ered from articles or excavation reports and included inthe sample (Bar-Yosef et al. 1992, Rak, Kimbel, and Hov-ers 1994, Akazawa et al. 1995, Hovers et al. 1995, Tillier1995, Vermeersch et al. 1998).

A number of criteria were used to determine if a burialbelonged to the Middle Paleolithic. First and foremost,

given that typological approaches have repeatedly beenshown to be seriously flawed (Dibble 1984, 1987; Dibbleand Rolland 1992; Bisson 2000), we looked instead for aMiddle Paleolithic or Mousterian technological signa-turethe dominance of flake-based retouched tools inlithic assemblages (except in the Levant, where blade-based tools appear to be the norm for that period [seee.g., Bar-Yosef and Kuhn 1999]). This definition roughlyparallels the traditional typology-based one and makesidentification of Middle Paleolithic archaeological stratapossible even in a survey that must depend on second-hand sources. If a proposed burial associated with anassemblage of Middle Paleolithic signature was recorded,it was assumed to date to the Middle Paleolithic. (The

use of this concept of signature is proposed simply as atool for classifying burials for the purposes of this study.)

In the rare instances when dates were available, if theburial was dated to over 40,000 b.p.3 it was also includedin the Middle Paleolithic sample. A big problem here isthat the various dates available were obtained by differ-ent methods applied to different materials across thesites (for a very detailed discussion of dating methodsapplied to the Paleolithic period, see Zilhao and dErrico1999a). Effectively, this means that the dates cannot bedirectly compared with each other. Since there are notemporally distinct Middle Paleolithic tool traditions(but see Mellars 1996), dates never contradicted the at-tribution of a grave to the Middle Paleolithic based on

assemblage signature.The Early Upper Paleolithic burials considered here

were compiled from a variety of sources, including syn-theses (Oakley, Campbell, and Molleson 1971,May 1986,Palma di Cesnola 1993) and detailed journal articles(Klima 1987a, b; Svoboda 1989; Svoboda and Vlcek 1991).There were, however, significant problems in identifying

3. The date of 40,000 b.p. is not typically associated with the endof the Middle Paleolithic but is used here because it excludes eventhe earliest recorded manifestation of the so-called MiddleUpperPaleolithic transition, characterized by the development of UpperPaleolithic tool types.


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the sites to be included in the sample. Very few sites aresecurely dated, and, although the cultures included inthe time interval chosen, 40,00020,000 years b.p., areonly the Chatelperronian, the Aurignacian, and theGravettian, these denominations are not valid over thewhole geographical area under investigation. For exam-ple, the Gravettian in Moravia is called the Pavlovian,defined as a unique and distinctive Moravian variationon the Gravettian theme (Svoboda 1994). This lack of aunified terminology points to the need for revision of theconceptual frameworks used for dealing with Upper Pa-leolithic industries (see Barton, Olszewski, and Coin-man 1996 for a lithic-based example). Furthermore, thecultural sequence is not necessarily the same in thevarious parts of the area under scrutiny. This often makesit difficult to understand precisely what researchersmean in temporal terms when they use similarchronotypological designations in different areas. If noth-ing else, this fundamental problem should cast seriousdoubt on the unilineal cultural evolution implied in theUpper Paleolithic typology devised by de Sonneville-Bor-des and Perrot (1953, 1954, 1955, 1956).

Another problem was the significant discrepancies be-tween typological designations and absolute dates. Forexample, while Palma di Cesnola (1993:40610) assignsall the Barma Grande graves to the earliest part of theUpper Paleolithic, recent 14C dates (Bisson, Tisnerat, andWhite 1996) show that they really postdate 20,000 yearsb.p. and therefore fall outside of our time range. This isa major problem, since most Early Upper Paleolithic siteshave been classified chronotypologically but never dated.It can be hoped, however, that renewed interest in thismaterial, most of it excavated in the late 19th or early20th century, will eventually result in a more adequateradiometric chronology. In sum, most of the material inthe Early Upper Paleolithic sample was either supportedby absolute dates or assigned to the Chatelperronian, theAurignacian, or (more rarely) the Gravettian.

The compilation of the data resulted in a sample of 45alleged Middle Paleolithic and 32 alleged Early UpperPaleolithic burials (excluding the 18 individuals from thePredmost mass grave, for which secure information islacking). The variables selected for study include sex,age, body position, grave orientation, grave features, andgrave goods, all of which are fairly standard in the studyof Paleolithic burials4 (Binford 1968, Harrold 1980, Smir-nov 1989, Defleur 1993). In addition, the hominid type

of recovered skeletons was also recorded on the chancethat species- or population-specific mortuary practicesmight be identified. Finally, evidence of pathology on therecovered skeletons was also noted, following Defleurs(1993:225) suggestion that it may have been a significant

4. Most of these criteria are far from unambiguously identified.Besides those characteristics of skeletons which can often be mis-interpreted in incomplete individuals (age and sex), the question ofburial orientation is also difficult, since burials may have beenoriented according to nearby features of the landscape that havelong since disappeared (rivers, trees, etc.) rather than according tothe eight cardinal directions of Western geography. Beyond that,orientation relative to a specific spatial referent is rarely evident.

determinant of who was buried in the Middle Paleolithic.The relevant information is tabulated in tables 1 and 2.

It might have been interesting here to generate and usea diversity index like that employed by Harrold (1980:200) in his comparative study of Paleolithic burials.However, since we do not know the relative culturalvalue of various types of grave goods or whether the ab-sence of grave goods could be mitigated by more elabo-rate ritual ceremonies that left no archaeological traces,we considered it risky to do so.

Data Analysis

middle paleolithic burials

Analysis of the Middle Paleolithic sample (table 3) allowsthe following general observations. First, juveniles com-prise the largest part of the sample. Most recovered ju-veniles appear to be under 10 years of age, while most

males belong to the 1630 and 4150 age brackets.5 Fe-males are underrepresented.

Roughly one in five Middle Paleolithic burials con-tained an individual who showed signs of pathology. Twoout of seven identified females (disproportionately highfor this period) exhibited pathology.

The vast majority of inhumed individuals were Ne-anderthals. That the three sites that yielded modern hu-man burials produced roughly 30% of the burials mightbe interpreted as evidence that modern humans showeda higher propensity to bury their dead, but this wouldbe a risky assertion. Two of these sites (Qafzeh andSkhul) are among the oldest in our sample, while thethird, Taramsa, yielded a single rather plain grave anddates to between roughly 80,000 and 50,000 years b.p.(Vermeersch et al. 1998). Following the same dubiousline of reasoning, one could conclude that modern hu-man behavior actually became simpler rather than morecomplex over time.

In most cases, the placement and resting plane of therecovered individuals were not reported by the excava-tors. This is unfortunate, since in many ethnographiccultures body position is a significant part of the mor-tuary program (Carr 1995). Those bodies for which in-formation was available show that roughly equal num-bers rested on their backs or right sides andproportionally fewer of them on their left. This periodhas the only evidence for kneeling and seated po-sitions. Most of the skeletons were found in a contractedor tightly flexed position.

Data on grave orientation are also scarce, but mostburials for which information is available were orientedone way or another along an east-west axis. The onlysites where bodies were consistently oriented along aparticular axis are La Ferrassie and Qafzeh, and the sites

5. Most paleodemographic studies rely on five-year age-brackets,but we are using the brackets proposed by Defleurnot toreconstructa life table butto compare patterns between Middleand Early UpperPaleolithic groups. This use should not mask much of the varia-bility in the mortuary record.


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table 1Middle Paleolithic Mortuary Data

Burial Status Sexa AgeAgeClass Pathologyb

PhysicalTypec

BodyPositiond

Orien-tatione Featuresf Grave Goods

La Chapelle-aux-Saints

Certain M 50 4150 N Ne D/C WE P Bones, lithics?, nearbypits (lithics, boneshards)

Le Moustier 1 Probable M Youngadult

1630? N Ne R/F? ? Bone shard lithicpillow

Le Moustier 2 Probable J Child 210 N Ne ? ? P Lithics?, nearby pits(lithics, boneshards)

La Ferrassie 1 Certain M 4045 4150 N Ne D/F WE P Bone shards, rocksLa Ferrassie 2 Certain F 2530 1630 N Ne R/C EW P La Ferrassie 3 Certain J 10 210 N Ne ? ? P Lithics, nearby pits

(lithics, boneshards)

La Ferrassie 4a Certain J Foetus Foetus N Ne ? ? P Lithics, rock overgrave

La Ferrassie 4b Certain J 1 mo. 01 N Ne ? ? P Lithics, rock overgrave, three nearbypits

La Ferrassie 5 Certain J Foetus Foetus N Ne ? ? P/M LithicsLa Ferrassie 6 Certain J 3 210 N Ne ? EW P Lithics, rock over

graveLa Ferrassie 8 Probable J 2 210 N Ne ? ? La Quina Certain F ? 1630 Y Ne R/? ? Spheroid, bone shards,

sediment covering?Le Regourdou Certain ? ? 3140 N Ne L/C WE P/M/H Lithics, bear bones,

rock over skeletonLe Roc-de-Marsal Certain J 3 210 N Ne L/F? NS P Sandstones, bone

shard pillow, ant-lers, sedimentcovering?

Spy 1 Certain M ? 3140 N Ne ? EW Spy 2 Probable F ? 1630 N Ne ? ? Tabun Certain F 30 1630 N Ne D/F WE P Skhul 1 Certain J Child 210 Y AMH K ? P Skhul 4 Certain M 4050 4150 N AMH R/C SENW P Lithics?Skhul 5 Certain M 3040 3140 N AMH D/C WE P Boar mandibleSkhul 6 Probable M ? 3140 N AMH ? ? Skhul 7 Certain F 35 3140 N AMH R/C ? Skhul 9 Probable M ? 4150 Y AMH ? ? Qafzeh 3 Certain F ? 4150 N AMH L/E? ? Qafzeh 8 Certain M Adult 3140 N AMH R/F EW P Lithics?, ochre, stones

over skeleton, dou-ble grave

Qafzeh 9 Certain F Youngadult

1630 Y AMH L/F NS P

Qafzeh 10 Certain J 6 210 N AMH L/C EW P Qafzeh 11 Certain J 1314 1115 N AMH D/C NS P Ochre?, bone shards,

trophies, rocks overskeleton

Qafzeh 15 Probable J 810 210 N AMH ? ? P Shanidar 1 Certain M 3040 3140 Y Ne D/? WE P/M Sediment covering?

Shanidar 2 Probable M 2030 1630 N Ne ? ? M/H Lithics?Shanidar 3 Certain M 40 4150 Y Ne R/? EW P/M Shanidar 4 Certain M 3040 3140 N Ne L/C SENW P/M Flowers, sediment

covering?Shanidar 5 Certain M 40 4150 Y Ne ?/C ? M/H Large mammal bones?Shanidar 7 Certain J 9 mos. 01 N Ne R/C NS H Amud 1 Certain M Adult 1630 N Ne R/C NS Amud 7 Certain J 10 mos. 01 N Ne R/E NWSE P Red deer maxilla on

pelvisKebara 1 Probable J 7 mos. 01 N Ne ? ? Kebara 2 Certain M Adult 1630 N Ne D/? EW P/H Dederiyeh 1 Certain J 13 210 N Ne D/E SN P Limestone slab over

head, triangularflint flake overheart

Taramsa 1 Certain J 810 210 N AMH S/C EW P/M


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table 1(Continued)


PhysicalTypec

BodyPositiond


Kiik-Koba 12 Probable M Adult 3140 N Ne ? ? P Kiik-Koba 2 Probable J 1 01 N Ne ? ? P Teshik-Tash Certain J 810 210 N Ne ? ? P Circle of goat hornsStaroselje Probable J 2 210 Y Ne D/E WE P

Multiple burial.aM, male; F, female; J, juvenile (impossible to determine sex).bY, present (injury, disease, malformation); N, absent.cNe, Neanderthal; AMH, anatomically modern human.dD, dorsal; L, lying on left side; R, lying on right side; V, ventral; F, flexed; C, contracted; K, kneeling; E, extended (based on head-feet axis); S, seated.eW, west; E, east; N, north; S, south; SE, southeast; NW, northwest.fP, pit (visible or deduced); M, mound; H, hearth.

which contained the most burials, Skhul and Shanidar,show a lack of standardization in grave orientation. Thismay be significant, since one would assume that a co-herent mortuary program represented by multiple suc-cessive inhumations would consistently orient bodies inthe same or similar directions.

Slightly more than three-quarters of the burials hadassociated features (pits, hearths, mounds, stone casings).Most were associated with pits. Mounds and hearthswere also reported with some burials but were rare. Mostgraves had a single associated feature. This implies thatat least some effort and energy was expended in disposingof most Middle Paleolithic bodies in graves.

A little more than half the burials contained gravegoods. Most of these appear to have been stone tools(although no use-wear studies appear to have been con-ducted to see whether they were used prior to being bur-ied), but animal bones, oddly shaped rocks, and sedi-ments of distinctive color or texture were all also foundin graves (Defleur 1993:257). Only two graves containedochre, and when present this material was found onlyin pebble form. Striae show that these pebbles had beenrubbed repeatedly across relatively hard surfaces prior totheir inclusion in the graves.

If one thing characterizes putative Middle Paleolithicgrave goods, it is that they are not extremely variable innature and that, except perhaps for the associated animalbones, most do not appear to have been exceptional

items. The problem, of course, is that we have no wayof knowing what, if anything, was symbolized by theinclusion of these items. Vandermeersch (1976) is of theopinion that many of the so-called grave goods couldhave become associated with the skeletons as a result ofthe filling of the pits. This may be true, but the fact thatsome bodies were found with unambiguous gravegoodsdespite Gargetts claims to the contrarysuggests that the practice was present (see Hovers et al.1995, Hovers, Kimbel, and Rak 2000). Subtlety is de-manded in assessing whether items recovered withgraves represent intentional inclusions, as it has beenshown that the criteria used by researchers may often be

too strict when it comes to Middle Paleolithic burials(Belfer-Cohen and Hovers 1992).

early upper paleolithic burials

For the Early Upper Paleolithic, it appears that maleswere buried more often than both females and juveniles.Adults appear to have accounted for at least three-quar-ters of the burials, but females were half as numerousas males. Burial seems to have been reserved mostly forindividuals in age-brackets 1630 and 3140.

Pathology is rare and distributed evenly between adultmales and females. This suggests that pathology may nothave been a significant consideration in the selection ofindividuals for burial, although Doln Vestonice XV (thefemale of the triple burial) exhibits pathology (Klima1987a, b).

The overwhelming majority of burials were modernhumans; only one Neanderthal (Saint-Cesaire 1) and asupposed Neanderthal/modern hybrid (Lagar Velho 1)were recovered. In the absence of clear criteria for dis-tinguishing Neanderthals from modern humans, it wasimpossible to determine whether extremely robust in-dividuals represented a significant part of the sample.Interesting insights regarding the biological processes atwork during the Early Upper Paleolithic might well bederived from isolating such a group and analyzing italong with Lagar Velho 1.

The preferred body position appears to have been adorsal and fully extended one, although some tightlyflexed (contracted) and semiflexed burials account for afair share of the reported graves. Interestingly, this periodis the only one to show evidence of skeletons buried facedown (two cases). These observations would tend to sup-port the notion of a widespread mortuary program, al-though the high frequency of burials with unknown bodypositions precludes any statistical assessment.

Grave orientation does not appear to be patterned inany remarkable way. Only bodies found in multiple bur-ials were found oriented either in the same way or, as isthe case for Sungir 3 and 4, in complementary ways.


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table 2Early Upper Paleolithic Mortuary Data


PhysicalTypec

BodyPositiond


Balzo della Torre I Certain M 2530 1630 N AMH D/E NWSE Headdress, necklace,bracelet, armband,ochre cover, bonepoint, ochred splitbear canine, animalhide?

Balzo della Torre II Certain M Adult 1630 N AMH D/E NWSE H Necklace, armband,kneecap, flat uni-facial blade, ochredflint pebble

Balzo della Torre III Certain J 15 1115 N AMH V/E NWSE Grotta del Caviglione

ICertain M Adult 1630 N AMH L/F NS S, H Headdress, kneecap,

ochre cover, 2blades, ochre-filledcanal, animalhide?

Grotta dei Fanciulli I Certain M Youngadult/17

1630 N AMH R/C ? P, S Ochre cover (thick onskull), blade,headdress

Grotta dei FanciulliII

Certain F Olderadult/40

3140 N AMH R/C ? P Ochred bracelets, 2scrapers, 2 serpen-tine pebbles onforehead

Paglicci II Certain M Teen/13 1115 N AMH D/E SWNE S Headdress, necklace,bracelet, anklet,ochre cover (thickon head), manygood lithics

Paglicci III Certain F 1820 1630 N AMH D/E SN P Two diverse fill types,ochre cover (thickon head) and bed,chunks of ochredstone over grave,lithics, diadem

Veneri Parabitta I Certain M 125 1630? N AMH F/L ? P Veneri Parabitta II Certain F 125 1630? N AMH D/E ? P Ochred pebble, head-

dress, ochre overhead

Agnano Certain F 20 1630 N AMH ?/C ? Ochre, headdress,bracelet

Doln Vestonice III Certain F 3842 3040 N AMH R/F ? P Ochre, 2 incisedmammoth shoulderblades as cover, 10fox canines

Doln Vestonice XIII Certain M 1723 1630 N AMH D/E SN P Ochre on head, mam-moth ivory stakethrough pelvis, di-adem, mammothivory pendant

Doln Vestonice XIV Certain M 1723 1630 N AMH V/E SN P Ochre on head,diadem

Doln Vestonice XV Certain F? 1723 1630 Y AMH D/E SN P Ochre on head andbetween thighs, di-adem, piece ofdeer or horse rib inmouth

Doln Vestonice XVI Certain M 4050 4150 Y AMH R/F EW P, H Ochre on head, chestand pelvis, 4pierced canines,belt?

Pavlov I Certain M 4050 4150 N AMH ?/C ? P Incised mammothshoulder blade ascover


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table 2(Continued)


PhysicalTypec

BodyPositiond


Brno II Probable M Middle-aged

3140 N AMH ? ? P Ochre, necklace,bone/ivory discsand rings, variousbone/stone tools

Brno III Probable F Middle-aged

3140 N AMH R/C ? Ochre

Predmost 22 Probable J 910 210 N AMH ? ? Hare teeth onforehead

Predmost 27 Probable ? Adult ? N AMH D/E ? Traces of defleshingPredmost 118 Certain n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. P Multiple grave (differ-

ent times)Sungir 2 Certain M 5565 50 N AMH D/E NESW P Headdress, lithics,

necklace, bracelets,armbands, suit

Sungir 3 Certain J 79 210 N AMH D/E SWNE P Ochre bed, mediummammoth tuskspear, 8 javelins, 2knives, disc nearright temple,beaded clothes,headdress, bracelets,pins, rings, 2 boneornaments onchest, 2 batons decommandement

Sungir 4 Certain J 1213 1115 N AMH D/E NESW P Ochre bed, long mam-moth task spear, 3javelins, 1 knife,disc near right tem-ple, beaded clothes,headdress, bracelets,pins, rings

Combe Capelle Certain ? Adult ? N AMH D/E NS P Pierced shells, toothon right wrist

Les Cottes Probable M? 5060 50 Y AMH ? ? Saint-Cesaire Probable M Adult N Ne SB? ? Cro-Magnon 1 Probable M 50 50 N AMH ? ? Shells? Pendant?Cro-Magnon 2 Probable F 2030 1630 Y AMH ? ? Shells?Cro-Magnon 3 Probable M 3040 3140 N AMH ? ? Shells?Cro-Magnon 5 Probable I 1 mo. 01 N AMH ? ? Shells?Lagar Velho 1 Certain J 3 210 N Hybrid D/E EW P, H Ochre, wrap, stones

and red deer boneslining, singlepierced shell

Multiple burial.aM, male; F, female; J, juvenile (impossible to determine sex).bY, present (injury, disease, malformation); N, absent.cNe, Neanderthal; AMH, anatomically modern human.dD, dorsal; L, lying on left side; R, lying on right side; V, ventral; F, flexed; C, contracted; K, kneeling; E, extended (based on head-

feet axis); S, seated.eW, west; E, east; N, north; S, south; SE, southeast; NW, northwest.fP, pit (visible or deduced); M, mound; H, hearth.

A significant number of graves were found with noassociated features, although most showed traces of apit. A few exhibited hearths or stone casings over theirheads and/or feet. No mounds were reported for any bur-ial of this period. Only a handful of burials had as manyas two associated features.

Finally, the vast majority of Early Upper Paleolithicburials appear to have contained grave goods of somekind. This pattern may be more apparent than real. It is

based on figures that include the four Cro-Magnon bur-ials claimed by May (1986:3738) to be associated withover 300 shells and a single pendant. The association ofthis material with any of the Cro-Magnon skeletons isfar from unambiguous, and some writers discount it al-together (Oakley, Campbell, and Molleson 1971:1045;Harrold 1980:205). If this were done here, the proportionof Early Upper Paleolithic graves unambiguously asso-ciated with grave goods would fall to three-quarters.


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table 3Characteristics of Middle (N p 45) and Early Upper(N p 32) Paleolithic Burials Compared

Characteristic Middle Upper

SexMale 17 16Female 7 8Juvenile 20 6Unknown 1 2

Age01 7 1210 12 31115 1 31630 9 123140 9 54150 7 250 0 3Unknown 0 3

PathologyPresent 8 4Absent 37 28

Physical typeNeanderthal 32 1

Modern 13 30Hybrid 0 1

PlacementExtended 4 13Flexed 6 4Contracted 14 6Unknown 21 9

Resting planeDorsal 9 12Ventral 0 2Left 6 2Right 10 5Seated 1 0Kneeling 1 0Unknown 18 11

Grave orientationN 4 3NE 0 2E 6 2

SE 2 0S 1 4SW 0 2W 7 0NW 1 3Unknown 21 16

Grave featuresPit 31 17Hearth 5 4Mound 8 0Stone casing 0 3

Number of features0 11 121 26 162 8 43 1 0

Grave goodsPresent 23 28Absent 22 4

The Middle and Early Upper PaleolithicCompared

Despite claims that both periods display definite regionalburial groups with fundamental similarities (Binford1968, Defleur 1993), the case for such clustering is shaky.While concentrations of Middle Paleolithic graves havebeen found in the French Perigord as well as in northernIsrael, these graves are not contemporaneous within thelimits of dating techniques and do not exhibit standard-

ized sets of mortuary practices. In fact, except for theprobably insignificant recurrence of grave orientation,these clusters do not appear to be internally consistentin the distribution of the variables analyzed in this study.This suggests that they represent random accumulationsof burials over long periods of time and that they werenot used as formal cemeteries by specific hominid groupswith different customs in the Middle Paleolithic. Simi-larly, for the Early Upper Paleolithic, although mostgraves were found clustered in the Grimaldi Caves inItaly (Balzo della Torre, Grotta del Caviglione, Grotta deiFanciulli) or near Pavlov Hill in Moravia (Doln Vesto-nice, Brno, Pavlov, Predmost), the burial practices re-flected in individual graves in these clusters are quitevariable. In fact, most of the observable within-clustersimilarities are derived from multiple burials. Multipleburials do appear, however, to be much more frequentin the Early Upper Paleolithic than in the Middle Pale-olithic, perhaps because increased population densitymade multiple simultaneous deaths a more frequentoccurrence.

Both samples have many more males than females,but the proportion of juveniles is much higher in theMiddle Paleolithic than in the Early Upper Paleolithic.Purposefully buried individuals do not constitute an ad-equate basis for reconstructing the population of whichthey were part, since it is likely that certain individualswere accorded preferential treatment as a result of statusand prestige derived from other aspects of their socialpersonae (Ubelaker 1978). Therefore it is hazardous totry to interpret this patterning, especially across time.The large number of buried juveniles in the Middle Pa-leolithic may reflect an emphasis on the value of youngindividuals or a higher juvenile death rate, but it wouldbe dangerous to accept either of these interpretationsgiven the extremely small and almost certainly non-representative sample available. Doing so would also im-ply acceptance of the reified interpretation of the Middleand Upper Paleolithic derived from typological syste-matics that portray them as distinct by definition(Bordes1961; Sonneville-Bordes and Perrot 1954, 1955, 1956).

Nothing reliable can be said of the position of the bod-ies or of grave orientation because for many graves fromboth periods these data are unrecorded. We can, however,say something about the prevalence of particular hom-inid taxa in the two periods; it is interesting that a Ne-anderthal and a hybrid are present in contexts that,

defined typologically and chronometrically, are unques-tionable Early Upper Paleolithic.Lagar Velho 1 is especially interesting in this regard.

Indeed, the presence of this hybrid in a Gravettian orproto-Solutrean context dated to roughly 24,500 b.p.(Duarte et al. 1999, Trinkaus, Zilhao, and Duarte 1999)underscores the realization that first emerged with thediscovery of the Saint-Cesaire Neanderthal in a Chatel-perronian context (Leveque and Vandermeersch 1980,1981)that cultures as defined by typological syste-matics cannot be equated with specific hominid types(Clark, cited in Norris 1999:46). Typological interpreta-tions are based on retouched stone tools, but the habit


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of linking modern humans with symbolic behavior orburials inferred from the Upper Paleolithic archaeolog-ical record is simply an extension of that traditional ty-pological framework.

Comparing the number and kinds of features associ-ated with burials also results in interesting patterns. Pro-portionally more Middle Paleolithic than Early UpperPaleolithic burials have associated features, and MiddlePaleolithic burials have more of them. Except for Tar-amsa 1, which was covered by a mound, none of theMiddle Paleolithic modern human burials was associ-ated with more than a pit. The presence of pits is note-worthy here, since it is one of Gargetts criteria for pur-poseful burial and he sees pits as absent in the MiddlePaleolithic. Roughly 70% of Middle Paleolithic graveswere reported as associated with a pit that either wasvisible to the excavators or could be inferred from theskeletons position. This is substantially more than theroughly 50% of Early Upper Paleolithic burials claimedto have included pitspits that in all probability weredetected in much the same ways as in Middle Paleolithiccontexts. Mounds were reported only from Middle Pa-leolithic contexts, while stone casings were found as-sociated exclusively with the Early Upper Paleolithic.Mounds were, however, somewhat more frequent. Anumber of possible interpretations of this clear-cut pat-tern could be offered, but they would be of little utilitybecause the meaning attached to each is likely to beculture-specific.

The one variable that has repeatedly been argued toshow a strong dichotomy between Middle and Early Up-per Paleolithic burials is grave goods (Binford 1968, Har-rold 1980), although some believe they provide convinc-ing evidence of continuity (e.g., May 1986). The onlysupposedly empirical treatment to which grave goodshave been subjected is Harrolds diversity index. Whatshould in fact be measured, however, is not so much thedifference between the two periods as variation withinthem. If grave goods are consistently the same withineach period, then we cannot use them to monitor changein mortuary behavior. The differences in the nature ofthe grave goods characteristic of each period could beexplained in a number of ways. For example, recent workby Stiner in Italy and Israel has shown that small gameand shellfish were increasingly incorporated into UpperPaleolithic diets but were virtually absent in some areasduring the Middle Paleolithic (Stiner 1994, Stiner,

Munro, and Surovell 2000). If this was indeed the case,the presence of discarded shells and the bones of smallanimals in Early Upper Paleolithic burials would surelyconstitute little evidence for a significant cognitiveleap over the Middle Paleolithic pattern of includingthe discarded bones of large mammals in graves. A sim-ilar argument could be made about the incised mam-moth scapulae reported from a number of Eastern Eu-ropean Early Upper Paleolithic burials.

Similarly, ochre, which becomes relatively commonin Early Upper Paleolithic graves, can be explained infunctional rather than symbolic terms. It could have pro-vided better insulation against cold and humidity, pro-

duced smoother surfaces on ground and polished bonebeads, served as an astringent or antiseptic, or evenslowed down putrefaction (Wreschner 1980; May 1986:2034). Therefore its presence in graves may simply in-dicate knowledge of a useful substance that was gradu-ally invested with aesthetic and/or ritual properties overthe course of the Upper Paleolithic. Its occurrence insome of the Qafzeh burials shows that it was known(and probably used) in the Middle Paleolithic. This sug-gests that it may have come into widespread use onlylater, perhaps after 20,000 years b.p.

In any case, even if the Cro-Magnon burials are ex-cluded from the count, a higher proportionof Early UpperPaleolithic than Middle Paleolithic burials are associatedwith relatively unambiguous grave goods. The propor-tional difference between the two is significant. Ratherthan suggesting a radical behavioral departure in theEarly Upper Paleolithic, however, what this pattern sug-gests to us is the emergence of a behavior that appearsto have been already well established in the MiddlePaleolithic.

Although Early Upper Paleolithic grave goods tend toinclude bracelets, headdresses, necklaces, armbands, andother ornaments in contrast to the animal bones foundin Middle Paleolithic contexts, it is now clear that Mid-dle Paleolithic Neanderthals did manufacture some or-naments (see dErrico et al. 1998 for a review of some ofthe evidence). Given the evidence of continuity sug-gested by the inclusion of stone tools in many burials ofboth periods, this suggests that the meaning originallyassociated with unworked bones or bone fragments maygradually have come to be embodied by ornaments. Thegradual nature of this phenomenon is supported by theco-occurrence of animal bones and ornaments at EarlyUpper Paleolithic sites such as Pavlov, Doln Vestonice,and Lagar Velho. Perhaps the higher incidence of gravefeatures in the Middle Paleolithic sample also reflectsthis phenomenon. It is, of course, impossible to knowthe precise meanings these grave goods had for the ex-tinct societies of which they were once part. Their time/space distributions are orders of magnitude beyond thoseof any real or imaginable foraging society or group ofsocieties known to us from ethnography (Clark 1993). Itis indisputable, however, that grave goods were an in-tegral part of mortuary practices starting in the MiddlePaleolithic and increased in frequency in later peri-odsslowly during the Early Upper Paleolithic and more

rapidly in the Late Upper Paleolithic (Duff, Clark, andChadderdon 1992).

Discussion and Conclusions

Comparing the Middle and Early Upper Paleolithic ev-idence for burial proves to be an illuminating exercise.Gargetts assumption that the Upper Paleolithic evi-dence reveals differences that obviate the need for a com-parison between the two (1999:30) is wrong. Indeed, thepicture that emerges is one of broad continuity betweenthe two periods. That said, there is also little doubt that


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analyzing burials from the Upper Paleolithic en blocwould show a quite different picture, as is suggested bythe pioneering studies of Binford (1968) and Harrold(1980). This is largely because of the numerical domi-nance of Late Upper Paleolithic, especially Magdalenian,burials that postdate 20,000 years b.p. (Duff, Clark, andChadderdon 1992). However, the continuity clearly vis-ible in the mortuary data of the Middle and Early UpperPaleolithic suggests that the Upper Paleolithic taken asa whole is not an appropriate unit of comparison. A com-parison of the patterns derived from an analysis of LateUpper Paleolithic burials with the patterns here identi-fied for the Early Upper Paleolithic is under way.

The continuity documented across the MiddleUpperPaleolithic transition, at least as far as burials are con-cerned, cannot be reconciled with the radical culturechange at the onset of the Early Upper Paleolithic en-visioned by most replacement advocates (e.g., Mellars1989, 1996). It also contrasts sharply with Gargetts ex-pectations about the Upper Paleolithic as a whole. Itwould appear from all this that the Upper Paleolithic asa category is not a very useful analytical tool (see alsoLindly and Clark 1990, Straus 1990, Stiner 1994, Kuhn1995). Subdivision into early (40,00020,000 years b.p.)and late (20,00010,000 years b.p.) phases would make ita much better framework for examining the behavioraland biological processes that were taking place in West-ern Eurasia at the time (Duff, Clark, and Chadderdon1992).

The results of the work reported here reinforce thoseof studies of lithic and faunal assemblages and of sitesettings and context in underscoring the problems as-sociated with uncritical use of temporal constructs de-rived from typological systematics (Clark and Lindly1991, Dibble and Rolland 1992, Bisson 2000). While use-ful as a descriptive tool and a lingua franca for scholars,

la methode Bordes, besides masking much variability inthe archaeological record, is based on unsupported as-sumptions about qualitative differences between moreor less arbitrary phases of the Paleolithic. The findingspresented here call into question the basis for this tra-ditional approach to the interpretation of Upper Pleis-tocene assemblages.

In sum, categorical rejection of Middle Paleolithic bur-ial is clearly unwarranted, and the continued use of tra-ditional temporal and conceptual frameworks in Paleo-lithic research is in need of serious rethinking. Such

rethinking should not be undertaken in the spirit of de-fending entrenched positions in the modern-human-or-igins debate, although it will likely have a significantimpact on them. Rather, it should be part of an effort toincrease the credibility of our interpretations, an objec-tive often sidelined in scholarly disputes despite its cen-tral importance in affirming the significance and unique-ness of archaeology as a form of scientific inquiry.

Comments

i a i n d a v i d s o n a n d w i l l i a m n o b l eSchool of Human and Environmental Studies/Schoolof Psychology, University of New England, Armidale,N.S.W. 2351, Australia ([email protected]).31 iii 01

Riel-Salvatore and Clark do not address what Gargett(1999) demonstrated. Gargetts point was that the goodtaphonomic information from well-excavated Neander-tal skeletons allows discussion of the taphonomic his-tories of the bodies. He showed that among the remainsof Neandertals claimed as burials, two processes seemto have operated. On the one hand are bodies crushedby rockfall like beer cans that someone has stomped on.These tend to be complete but broken collections ofbones, as at Shanidar and Saint-Cesaire. This process isalso evident in the bodies of early modern humans,contemporary with Neandertals, from Qafzeh. On theother hand are bodies that had lain in natural depressionsin the sediment such as might have been formed by cry-oturbation at La Ferrassie. Natural processes of sedimentformation had generally covered these bodies slowly; thetypical absence of significant limb segments stronglysuggested that the meat had rotted before interment ofthe bodies. This taphonomic history would explain theabsence of the skull from the Kebara 2 skeleton. Therewill be modern human bodies in caves for the same tworeasons as for Neandertals. That people were wanderingaround in dangerous landscapes long after the emergenceof modern human morphology is shown by Otzi, theNeolithic body found in the Austrian/Italian Alps (Spin-dler 1994).

The inclusion of Saint-Cesaire in table 2 confirms ourexpectation that beer cans/rockfall victims occurredafter 40,000 years ago, and we have no doubt that somebodies from this period would have been found withmissing parts just like the rotten meat Neandertals.The numbers of bodies subject to the Neandertal ta-phonomy will be much smaller because the time periodis shorter. If there were about 12 beer cans in the100,000 years of table 1, in the 20,000 years of table 2there should be about 2. This in itself suggests that thereis something rather different about the Early Upper Pa-

laeolithic sample that would account for the larger num-bers of bodies per thousand years, and indeed there issomething different. Many of the burials are in theopencertainly Doln Vestonice, Pavlov, Brno, Pred-most, and Sungir areand there are none in the openfor the sample in table 1. We have commented elsewhere(Noble and Davidson 1996) that a single open-air burialof a Neandertal would do more to confirm the hypothesisof Neandertal deliberate burial than any manipulationof the currently available (and not very reliable)evidence.The presence of burials of modern humans in the open,of course, is not unexpected, as the earliest (and earlier)burials of modern humans in Australia are also in the


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open (Davidson 1999a). Nothing could be a clearer in-dication of the danger of ignoring taphonomic histories.That there are more bodies per thousand years in thesample in table 2 is itself suggestive of different occur-rences affecting the items in the two tables, and furtheranalysis of the samples reveals what that differenceismodern humans were and Neandertals were not de-liberately buried.

It comes as a surprise, therefore, that Riel-Salvatoreand Clark argue that there is a similarity between table1 and table 2. Inspection of the data in table 2 shows theextent to which they have been willing to overlook ev-idence that they present. A x2 test on the frequencies ofgrave goods in the two sets of data gives a value (x2 p9.5), which is highly significant (p ! 0.01). Further in-spection of the nature of the grave goods confirms a sub-stantial difference between table 1 and table 2all of thethings claimed as grave goods in table 1 occur as part ofthe debris left in caves used by Neandertals and mighthave washed into natural hollows as part of the normalsedimentation process. This has been pointed out beforeby Harrold (1980). The grave goods in table 2 are differentfrom what is found in the earlier sample and would beeasier to associate with symbolic structuring of the world(albeit we acknowledge the need for caution pointed outby Riel-Salvatore and Clark).

We have classified the specimens from table 1 accord-ing to Gargetts (1999: fig. 9) analysis of beer cans (Qaf-zeh, Shanidar, Dederiyeh) and rotten meat (La Cha-pelle-aux-Saints, La Ferrassie, Le Roc de Marsal, Amud,Kebara, and Kiik-Koba). We omit Teshik Tash because itis so clearly ravaged that little can be said about theoriginal state of deposition of the body except that it was

not buried. Grave goods are rare with the beer cans,and those with the rotten meat are mostly lithics.There are two possible scenarios that do not require thesefinds to be grave goods. Either the rotten meat hadtheir gear with them, like Otzi, and died in their beds,or the lithics washed into the natural hollows where theydied. The fact that most of those in the sample were thejuveniles from La Ferrassie suggests that these are wash-ins, as it may be less likely that very young infants werecarrying their gear. The beer cans did not generallyhave grave goods (except for the flowersand these havebeen dismissed many times [Gamble 1989; Gargett 1989;Noble and Davidson 1989, 1996]). We might be temptedto go farther and suggest that Neandertals may not have

carried gear with them in the manner of Otzi anyway,but carrying seems to have been the distinctive homi-nine adaptation since 2.5 million years ago. It is morelikely that they did not sleep with their gear.

Overall, then, the data in tables 1, 2, and 3 show thatthere was a substantial difference between the bodiesthat date earlier than the Early Upper Palaeolithic andthe sample of later ones. Riel-Salvatore and Clark haveelegantly confirmed the importance of Gargetts (1999)analysis. Neandertals (and contemporary early modernpeople) were not buried; people from the Upper Palaeo-lithic (and contemporary people in other parts of theworld) often were. This is a separate matter from the

issue of variation in symbolic behaviour during the Up-per Palaeolithic (Davidson 1997, 1999b).

f . d e r r i c o a n d m . v a n h a e r e nInstitut de Prehistoire et de Geologie du Quaternaire,CNRS, and Universite Bordeaux I, Talence, France([email protected]). 3 iv 01

The potential of Palaeolithic burials for the debate onthe origin of symbolism and, by extension, of articulatedoral language and cultural modernity has been often un-derestimated, and the literature on the subject is mainlycomposed of surveys, mostly of old finds, and osteolog-ically based descriptions. Therefore, we welcome Riel-Salvatore and Clarks attempt to use burials as an in-dependent means of evaluating processes of biologicaland cultural change during the Upper Pleistocene. Thatsaid, we find that their attempt has some majorweaknesses.

The assumption on which they base their analy-sisthat the earliest phases of a cultural phenomenonmust necessarily be characterized by simpler forms ofbehaviourshould certainly be substantiated before be-ing accepted as a reliable theoretical framework. Notonly have many cultural anthropologists already criti-cized this faith in the continuous and inexorable progressof mankind (e.g., Kuper 1988) but also one can wonderwhether mortuary practices are the best place to applysuch a model. As is shown by the ethnography of tra-ditional societies, complex cultural systems may becharacterized by simple burials with high archaeologicalvisibility or, alternatively, complex mortuary practicesthat leave little or no archaeological evidence. Also, du-rable grave goods may be absent in burials produced byhighly complex societies. We see, in principle, no reasonthis should have been different in Upper and even MiddlePalaeolithic societies. If we are right, the pattern thatRiel-Salvatore and Clark try to read as a process mayinstead represent snapshots of behaviours from differentsocieties with equivalent cognitive abilities. It would, inthis case, be only the presence or absence of funerarypractices rather than their apparent variability that mat-ters for identifying evolutionary trends.

We see a major epistemological problem in Riel-Sal-vatore and Clarks way of testing Gargetts naturalinterpretation. It is not by comparing and looking for

differences between Middle Palaeolithic and Upper Pa-laeolithic burials that one can establish whether the for-mer are natural or anthropic in origin. We need naturalanalogies to test natural interpretations, and it is pre-cisely the lack of these analogies that, in our view, keepsthe debate on Neandertal burial practices open and even-tually weakens Gargetts position. The inadequacy ofRiel-Salvatore and Clarks approach is demonstrated bythe fact that, according to their model, they would haveconsidered the Middle Palaeolithic burials natural in or-igin if they had found significant differences betweenthem and the Upper Paleolithic burials. Still, given thevariability of mortuary practices in traditional societies


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(see Pearson 1999), differences between Middle Palaeo-lithic and Upper Palaeolithic burials do not imply thenatural origin of the former and may, in the absence ofa natural analogue, simply reflect cultural changes withno evolutionary implications. In other words, we cannotoblige Middle Palaeolithic people to bury their dead inthe same way Upper Palaeolithic people did to grantthem the right to be incorporated into modern humanitywhile at the same time claiming diversity of mortuarypractices to be a hallmark of cultural modernity.

We also have reservations about the criteria used hereto separate the Middle from the Upper Palaeolithic andsubdivide the latter. The chronological criterionbeforeand after 40,000 b.p.is of little value considering theuncertainty of the dating methods of this period and thefact that most of the burials are not directly dated. Theblade/flake ratio is even more inadequate. Blade-basedindustries occur in the Middle Palaeolithic, and not justin the Near East (Bar-Yosef and Kuhn 1999), and flake-based industries occur in the Upper Palaeolithic. The useof this last criterion seems to overlook the contributionto the characterization of Palaeolithic industries of re-cent technological studies (see Zilhao and dErrico1999a:357 for an extensive discussion). These studieshave shown that Upper Palaeolithic technocomplexes,seen as chronologically and spatially defined technicalsystems, are useful analytical entities for exploring cul-tural variability, including changes in mortuary prac-tices, and the ecological adaptation of European hunter-gatherers during oxygen-isotope stages 32. Independentof their views on the transition, most of our colleaguesshare with us the opinion that insight into this timeperiod will not be reached without a better characteri-zation of these entities. Riel-Salvatore and Clarks cru-sade against the Upper Palaeolithic technocomplexes iseven more surprising given that they use chronologicallimits between technocomplexes (Gravettian/Solutrean)to establish an arbitrary frontier within the Upper Pa-laeolithic. Why not, instead, get rid of all chronologicalbarriers and look for significant clusters in the availabledata? This would be more coherent and avoid the im-pression that boundaries are being chosen to fit themodel.

Criticisms can also be leveled at their database. Giventhat many scholars believe that the placing of gravegoods in Neandertal burials has not been unambiguouslyproven, a thorough examination of the evidence, includ-

ing observations on site taphonomy, should have beentheir first concern. This does not appear in their list,which incorporates almost all of the claimed evidence,sometimes dubious, for symbolic behaviour associatedwith Middle Palaeolithic burials.

Incidentally, Riel-Salvatore and Clark group Zilhaoand dErrico with researchers such as Mellars who arguethat despite their ability to act symbolically, Neander-thals apparently never refined this capacity to the samedegree as modern humans and were therefore con-demned to be replaced by them. From the debate onthis topic (see dErrico et al. 1998; Zilhao and dErrico1999a, b; Mellars 1999) it is clear that they defend a quite

opposite viewthat Neandertals were fully capable ofsymbolic behaviours and may even have produced thembefore contact with anatomically modern humans, as issuggested by archaeological evidence, notably from Arcy,and a critical reappraisal of relevant sites and C14 dates.Riel-Salvatore and Clarks attempt to examine the em-pirical evidence without any wishful thinking about ahuman types cognitive abilities in fact complementsZilhao and dErricos effort, which was, however, carriedout in a quite different theoretical framework.

r o b e r t h . g a r g e t tArchaeology and Palaeoanthropology, School ofHuman and Environmental Studies, University ofNew England, Armidale, N.S.W. 2351, Australia([email protected]). 1 iv 01

Riel-Salvatore and Clark caricature my recent contri-butions (see also Gargett 2000) by implying that Gargett(1999) is nothing more than a replay of Gargett (1989)when in fact it examines a wide range of processes thatdetermine the preservation of skeletons in caves androck-shelters. Furthermore, instead of grappling with theissues I raise they defer to Binford (1968), Harrold (1980),and Defleur (1993), none of whom has adequately ex-amined the variables with which I deal in my recentarticle. Their unwillingness to acknowledge my misgiv-ings about what they treat as evidence for burial severelyhobbles their argument. Beyond this, their paper hasother serious failings.

First, their argument begs the question whether pur-poseful burial occurred in the Middle Paleolithic. Theirsample of Middle Paleolithic burials includes onlythose specimens that conform to criteria they say allowone to infer purposeful burial. If this is truly a test ofwhat they claim is my position (i.e., that purposefulburial first occurred in the Upper Paleolithic), why dothey ignore the many fragmentary Middle Paleolithic re-mains? The relatively few more-or-less-intact specimensclaimed as burials represent only a small subset of asample that describes a continuum of preservation in-cluding, for example, single fragments, disarticulated,fragmented, and incomplete skeletons, articulated por-tions of skeletons, articulated complete or nearly com-plete skeletons, and everything in between. The vast ma-jority of Middle Paleolithic specimens fall into the first

two of these categories, and the vast majority of putativeburials fall into the third; only a few could be consideredcomplete or nearly so. Riel-Salvatore and Clark draw theline opportunistically at various places along that con-tinuum. Clearly, this is stacking the deck in favor of theirhoped-for outcome.

Furthermore, they contend that they began by select-ing articulated specimens and included only those forwhich other archaeological discoveries supported the in-ference of purposeful burial. Yet their sample includes anumber of specimens that are anything but articulated(to say nothing of those for which the degree of articu-lation is a matter of interpretation)for example, Teshik-


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Tash, Regourdou, La Ferrassie 4a, and Saint-Cesaire.These specimens were apparently included because of abelief that they had been purposefully buried based onfragments of bone or chipped stone interpreted as funeralofferings and inferences of invisible pits and other so-called ritual structures. Thus, Riel-Salvatore and Clarkssampling technique has the effect of skewing the dataon which their test is to be conducted.

Perhaps most damaging to their argument, the evi-dence that Riel-Salvatore and Clark employ is at bestequivocal. For example, in the absence of articulation asa sign of purposeful burial, interpreting Teshik-Tashsgoat horns as a ritual structure depends on the belief thatthe individual had been purposefully buried (or at leastthat Neandertals were capable of burying their dead). Inmuch the same category is the claim that the moundsat La Ferrassie are ritual structures, which fails to takeinto account the obvious, abundant evidence of cry-oturbation in stratum c/d (from which all of the remainsat La Ferrassie derive). The mounds that Peyrony (1934)describes are in all probability sediments that have beendistorted and convoluted by cryoturbation. Laville andTuffreaus (1984) photograph of the witness profile at LaFerrassie clearly shows the result of cryoturbation instratum c/d, and Heim (1968) includes a profile thatclearly and unequivocally illustrates the convoluted sed-iments. Four of these convolutions are on the order of50 cm high. However, in Heims diagram the tops of atleast two of them are leaning to one side and have theshape of cresting waves. Such a profile could not haveoccurred if the mounds had been artificially created andlater covered naturally with sediment (unless they werethen subjected to cryoturbationa coincidence that Iwould find it hard to imagine, although it is impossibleto rule it out). Here, then, are the present-day remnantsof mounds like the nine so often considered mortuarystructures. With clear evidence for cryoturbation just afew meters away from the putative burial mounds, mustone go on believing that they were created with a ritualpurpose in mind?

Finally, Riel-Salvatore and Clarks criteria for assessingbehavioral continuity are only weakly justified. Onthe face of it, comparing the Middle Paleolithic with theUpper Paleolithic is a reasonable test of what they callmy hypothesis. But is it reasonable to suggest thatsignificant patterns will be observable on both sides ofthe Middle/Upper Paleolithic boundary? The answer

seems to depend on ones definition of significant andones choice of pattern.There is, first of all, the straightforward kind of pattern

that one can read off the skeletonssex, age, patholog-ical lesions. But sex and age are straightforward onlyif one overlooks the difficulty of, for example, determin-ing sex in skeletons that are, more often than not, miss-ing the telltale pubic architecture, requiring a determi-nation based on robusticity and comparison withpresent-day human sexual dimorphism. Assessing rela-tive robusticity is in no way straightforward in a veryrobust, biogeographically widespread morphospeciessuch as the Neandertals, which have an unknown degree

of sexual dimorphism. What this means for Riel-Salva-tore and Clarks data on differential mortuary treatmentis an open question, but one can certainly be skepticalabout their conclusions. They seem unconcerned thatmany of these patterns are reified categories that havetheir origin in the questionable interpretations of otherarchaeologists.

Next there is the kind of pattern that one needs toargue more strenuously for. For example, Riel-Salvatoreand Clark aver that fragments of bone might just rep-resent the beginning of a trajectory of cultural transfor-mation that sees them as the meaningfully constitutedMiddle Paleolithic equivalent of the carved images andornaments of the Early Upper Paleolithic. Although thisis a plausible scenario, it is by no means the basis for anunequivocal inference of continuity.

The most egregious misuse of the notion of pattern isin their so-called burial features (primarily pits andmounds). We are told that there are 31 pits associatedwith Middle Paleolithic remains, and these are presentedas support for claims of purposeful burial. In all cases ofunobservable pits, the inference that the pit once existeddepends on the a priori assumption that the individualhad been purposefully buriedmore circular argument.Moreover, such pits could just as easily be seen as pre-requisite for natural burial. Low spots (regardless of howthey were created, and there are many natural ways) pro-mote natural burial. Under the circumstances it is hardto see such evidence as compelling, especially giventhat the very few observable depressions were filled notwith the same sediments into which they were dug,which would be expected in a purposeful burial, but withthe same sediments that overlie those into which theywere dug, which is strongly suggestive of natural in-fill-ing and in any case precludes the use of the pit or lowspot as unequivocal support for the claim of purposefulburial.

All of Riel-Salvatore and Clarks conclusions rest onarguments from want of evident alternatives. Ultimatelytheir argument is fallacious and their analysis uncon-vincing because both rest on the a priori acceptance ofshakily supported claims of purposeful Middle Paleo-lithic burial.

I am resigned to the reality that most paleoanthro-pologists will never be persuaded by my position, butI hope that readers will see that my skepticism is rig-orously empirical and grounded in a nuanced under-

standing of archaeological site formation. Moreover, Ihope that they will see this paper for what it isa whole-sale recycling of dubious archaeological claims in thepursuit of evidence for the regional continuity modelof modern human origins.

e r e l l a h o v e r s a n d a n n a b e l f e r - c o h e nInstitute of Archaeology, The Hebrew University ofJerusalem, Jerusalem 91905, Israel (hovers@

h2.hum.huji.ac.il ). 30 iii 01

Tracing uniquely human behaviors has always been afocal point of prehistoric research. Riel-Salvatore and


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Clark are to be congratulated for bringing to the forefrontof contemporary discussion the complexities of the ar-chaeological record concerning intentional human burialin the Middle and Upper Paleolithic. They achieve thisby confronting the available data instead of acceptingGargetts (1999:30) premise that the Upper Paleolithicevidence reveals differences [in burial behavior] that ob-viate the need for a comparison between these twoperiods.

Indeed, in the Paleolithic we are dealing with time andspace distribution orders of magnitude greater than thoseof any real or imaginable foraging society or group ofsocieties known to us from ethnography. Another im-portant point made by Riel-Salvatore and Clark is thatthe simplistic equation of culture with hominid type iscounterproductive to attempts to understand culturechange at the Middle/Upper Paleolithic boundary. Withthese points taken, a caveat is called for: human behavioris multifaceted, encompassing as it does constituentswhich are variably and not always understandably in-terrelated. Dealing with the Paleolithic, we rest assuredthat the unfolding record is one of mosaic cultural ev-olution rather than of a linear trajectory of change. Un-derstanding the Paleolithic story depends on the scale ofones observations and insights as it does on the datathemselves. Unquestionably, human behavior becomesmore complex through time, but when observed in morerestricted time spans the Paleolithic pattern of culturechange is clearly not linear. At any given time and place,some behaviors may change gradually while others re-main static and yet others may undergo dramatic mod-ifications. The European Middle and Upper Paleolithicrecord is a case in point.

Much of the recent anthropological literature epito-mizes intentional burial as the marker of a plethora ofsymbolic capacities (see Gargett 1999 and referencestherein). But the existence of intentional burial in theMiddle Paleolithic record speaks only to the presence ofthis particular behavior as part of the cultural packageof hominids at this time. Intentional burial is not as-sociated exclusively with any one of the hominid taxaknown from this time span (Belfer-Cohen and Hovers1992, Schepartz 1993, Tillier 1990) and may well be anexpression of a shared, pleisiomorphic capacity forsymbolic behavior (Hayden 1993, Hovers et al. 1995).From the perspective of mosaic cultural evolution, theoccurrence of intentional burial need not be taken a

priori as an indication of the existence of other symbolicbehaviors, nor is it a yardstick against which the inten-sity of other symbolic behaviors can be measured. Byextension, where change through time is patterned asmosaic evolution, the rate of change in mortuary behav-ior cannot be used as a proxy for the tempo and modeof cultural evolution. It is for this reason that, even ifone accepts that mortuary behavior changed graduallyfrom the Middle Paleolithic to the Early Upper Paleo-lithic, the occurrence of large-scale parietal art in theEarly Upper Paleolithic, ca. 30,000 years ago, at Chauvetand Cosquer Caves (Bahn and Vertut 1997) remains un-accounted for. Other mechanisms need to be invoked in

order to explain first the revolutionary and dramatic ap-pearance of such art and second its coexistence with therelatively conservative mortuary behavior.

Moreover, gradual shift in burial practices does notappear to be an all-inclusive pattern of change throughtime between the Middle and the Early Upper Paleo-lithic. Gradualism is more apparent than real for somecharacteristics of burials, as is clearly seen from Riel-Salvatore and Clarks table 3. For instance, at Sungir, anEarly Upper Paleolithic site dated to 30,00025,000 yearsago (Bader 1998:217), the sheer numbers (over 13,000beads) and variety of grave goods are overwhelming(Bader 1998:7273, 77; Gamble 1994:18687). Certainlythis site resembles more the finds known from the LateUpper Paleolithic than it does accepted instances of in-tentional burial in the Middle Paleolithic.

Gradual transformation as the main explanatorymechanism of culture change masks the boundaries be-tween cultures. The differences among the Chatel-perronian (considered to be a Mousterian-based tradi-tion), the Aurignacian (believed to be intrusive intoWestern Europe), and the regional variants of the Grav-ettian (dErrico et al. 1998, Otte and Keeley 1990) areobliterated when burial data are used to treat the EarlyUpper Paleolithic as a whole. These classifications andcultural subdivisions of the entities of the Early UpperPaleolithic rely mainly on lithic techno-typological cri-teria and certainly have their problems. Nevertheless,classifications of this type are more consistent with thedynamics of the period, including population move-ments and influx into Europe during the time span ofthe Early Upper Paleolithic (e.g., Semino et al. 2001).

While the article deals with a particular phenomenonof human behavior, it relates to a profound analyticalissuethe measure of the phenomena observed in thearchaeological record. It seems that whenever we suc-ceed in obtaining an answer that has eluded us for years(in the case, the validity of Middle Paleolithic burials),we have to face the consequences of that answer. Theseare rarely, if ever, simple or clear-cut. One way to cometo terms with this unsettling reality is by rememberingthat this is, in fact, the normative procedure of scientificinquiry.

g r o v e r s . k r a n t z363 Gunn Rd., Port Angeles, Wash. 98362, U.S.A.

([email protected]). 2 ii 01

Riel-Salvatore and Clark have done rather well in fol-lowing the modern rules of successful publication: (1)keep the subject as narrow as possible to minimize thenumber of people who are qualified or likely to criticizeit; (2) quantify all data for at least arithmetic manipu-lation (statistics is better and computer analysis is best);(3) follow Established Doctrine wherever possible; and(4) provide an impressive bibliography that proves thatyou did your homework.

Their biggest failing is in rule 1, where they have in-cluded both Middle Paleolithic (Mouste

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