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Friday, 30 September 2005 |
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A group of Cambridge archaeologists have begun a novel collaboration with researchers from the Czech Republic to study how hunter-gatherers lived 28,000 years ago. Professor Martin Jones and a group of archaeological scientists from the McDonald Institute and the Department of Archaeology are working with colleagues from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic at the site of Dolní Vestonice in the Czech Republic.The area, which is approximately the size of central Cambridge, has been the focus of research since the 1920s and is an “amazing site” to study, according to Dr Tamsin O’Connell, one of the project’s researchers. The group have made important discoveries about life in this era; finding for example that the hearth of the house was a focus of craft activities such as clay modelling and weaving as well as cooking and eating. Interestingly, many of the dwellings excavated in this area are constructed from mammoth bones, believed by archaeologists to be the best building material available at the time due to harsh weather conditions and a lack of nearby trees. What makes the contribution of the Cambridge group to this collaboration so groundbreaking is that they are using scientific techniques that have never been applied to a site this old.The team will be using the latest biological and chemical methods to discover more about people’s diet and life in the cold and hostile Paleolithic environment. These include soil micromorphology, which allows investigation of soil structure, and phytolith analysis, which gives researchers information on vegetation cover and plant use by humans. In addition, isotopic analysis of excavated bones will show what kind of diets people might have had.The team intend to return to the area for at least the next two years to unearth more information about the life of our species 28,000 years ago. FM www.arch.cam.ac.uk
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