The Mediterranean from 50,000 to 25,000 BP: Turning Points and New Directions

The passage between the periods which we call Middle and Upper Palaeolithic has long held a special fascination for Palaeolithic archaeologists, but over the past ten years or so it has gone right to the top of the list of 'hot' research topics. Underpinning it all is genuine and apparently enduring public interest in what actually happened at this point in human history. Why so much public interest? Well, it's us, isn't it? - bright, clever, intelligent modern humans replacing those tiresome and deeply flawed, if quite charming, Neanderthals. Modern behaviours, art, population explosion, economic revolution, all happening at once well, probably, or possibly well, maybe not. This book is a highly informative progress report on the state of current research concerning the passage from Middle to Upper Palaeolithic, focusing on the Mediterranean.

Table of Contents

Foreword (Derek Roe); Introduction (Marta Camps and Carolyn Szmidt);
Where there’s a will there’s a way? 30 years of debate on the Mid-Upper Paleolithic transition in western Europe (Marta Camps);
A crossed-glance between southern European and Middle-Near Eastern early Upper Palaeolithic lithic complexes: Existing models, new perspectives (Foni Le Brun-Ricalens, Jean-Guillame Bordes and Laura Eizenberg);
The Middle-Upper Palaeolithic hiatus of insular north Africa (Angela E. Close);
The evolutions and revolutions of the Late Middle Stone Age and Lower Later Stone Age in north-west Africa (Elena A. A. Garcea);
Egypt from 50 to 25 ka BP: a scarcely inhabited region? (Pierre M. Vermeersch);
The shift from the Middle Palaeolithic to the Upper Palaeolithic: Levantine Perspectives (Anna Belfer-Cohen and A. Nigel Goring-Morris);
The Palaeolithic of Turkey (Marcel Otte and Isin Yalçinkaya);
Mediterranean southeastern Europe in the Late Middle and Early Upper Palaeolithic: modern human route to Europe or Neanderthal refugium? (Dimitria Papagianni);
The Early Upper Palaeolithic in Romania: past and current research (Ildiko Horvath);
Adriatic coast of Croatia and its hinterland from 50 000 to 25 000 BP (Ivor Karavanic);
Dating and Paleoenvironmental Interpretation of the late Pleistocene archaeological deposits at Divje Babe I, Slovenia (Bonnie A. B. Blackwell, Edwin S. K. Yu, Anne R. Skinner, Ivan Turk, Joel I. B. Blickstein, Dragomir Skaberne, Janez Turk and Beverly Lau);
Early Upper Paleolithic population dynamics and raw material procurement patterns in Italy (Julien Riel-Salvatore and Fabio Negrino);
From regional patterns to behavioural interpretation: Assessing the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition in Mediterranean France (Carolyn Szmidt);
Early evidence of the Aurignacian in Cantabrian Iberia and the North Pyrenees (Alvaro Arrizabalaga, Federico Bernaldo de Quirós, François Bon, María-José Iriarte, José-Manuel Maíllo and Christian Normand);
The Ebro frontier revisited (João Zilhão);
Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons in northern Spain: ongoing work at the Sopeña Rock-shelter (Asturias, Spain) (Ana C. Pinto-Llona, Goeffrey Clark, Alexandra Miller and Kaye Reed);
What’s in a name? Observations on the compositional integrity of the Aurignacian (Geoffrey A. Clark and Julien Riel-Salvatore);
La confusion Aurignacienne: disentangling the archaeology of modern human dispersals in Europe (Paul Mellars)