Almost fifty years after the seminal works of Binford (Reference Binford, Binford and Binford1968) and Flannery (Reference Flannery, Ucko and Dimbleby1969) there is still much debate regarding the validity of applying the traditional perspective of the so-called Broad Spectrum Revolution (BSR) model to archaeological contexts around the globe.
In fact, in recent years, a growing number of studies have tried to demonstrate that diet breadth amplification and resource intensification can no longer be thought to have suddenly appeared at the beginning of the Holocene, but that they have a much greater time depth within the history of human evolution (Stiner, Reference Stiner2001). In Iberia, for example, while the traditional tardiglacial paradigm of resource intensification was easily adopted by some authors (Aura et al., Reference Aura, Villaverde, González Morales, González Sainz, Zilhão and Straus1998), others have pushed it back to c. 18,000 years ago, with the increase in fish and shellfish consumption during the Solutrean (Clark & Straus, Reference Clark and Straus1986), and, more recently, to late Middle Paleolithic times (Bicho & Haws, Reference Bicho and Haws2008), possibly as far back as c. 150,000 years ago (Cortés-Sánchez et al., Reference Cortés-Sánchez, Morales-Muñiz, Simón-Vallejo, Lozano-Francisco, Vera-Peláez, Finlayson, Rodríguez-Vidal, Delgado-Huertas, Jiménez-Espejo, Martínez-Ruiz, Martínez-Aguirre, Pascual-Granged, Bergadà-Zapata, Gibaja-Bao, Riquelme-Cantal, López-Sáez, Rodrigo-Gámiz, Sakai, Sugisaki, Finlayson, Fa and Bicho2011).
This volume by Emily L. Jones is yet another important contribution with this background, encapsulating close to ten years of research by the author (e.g. Jones, Reference Jones2007, Reference Jones2015), with the aim of testing the applicability of the BSR model to Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers in southwestern Europe. Despite the generic title, it is important to note that the study only addresses the final Late Pleistocene/ Early Holocene sequence, using data from the Gravettian, Solutrean, Magdalenian, and Epipaleolithic techno-complexes.
The volume is organized in six chapters that can be systematized into two large sections: one consisting of a rather well-structured snapshot of the body of theory and methods used to inform the study; the other presenting the results of a series of analyses on site location and the archaeofaunal record from a very significant set of sites located in the Iberian Peninsula and southern France. Being a short-format volume, the book is well documented and illustrated with a total of thirty-two figures and tables. A bibliography is presented at the end of each chapter and a convenient glossary section is offered at the end of the book, where fifty-one simplified definitions of several core concepts (e.g. ANOVA, Patchiness, Younger Dryas) used throughout the text are presented.
I must say that this was my first contact with a Springer Briefs in Archaeology series volume and it was, in general, a fairly good surprise. The way chapters are structured and the simplicity used in concept explanations and overall language are remarkable. For this and the nature of Jones’ study, I believe this specific volume will become an important student text book over the next years. The light, but still scientific, approach used in the explanation of most theoretical and methodological concepts makes this a really good first-contact volume for young archaeologists who may be interested in studying not only Palaeolithic subsistence but hunter-gatherer adaptations in general. In this sense, I feel and hope that it will allow the gap to be bridged between the overwhelming array of pure data-based publications and the more theory-oriented works. This is not to say, however, that the book is not valuable for more experienced researchers, because it certainly is all we could expect from a well-structured, hypothesis-driven, analytical study, addressing a rather relevant issue in human evolution.
In Chapter 1, ‘Paleolithic People, Paleolithic Landscapes’, the reader is introduced to the rationale behind the choice of theme, particularly to the importance of zooarchaeology in the task of better understanding human-environment interactions in the past, and to why southwestern Europe is the perfect fertile testing ground for this and other studies. The latter line of reasoning is mostly based on the biogeographic and bioclimatic diversity of Iberia and southern France, and on the rather long history of archaeological research in those regions.
This chapter also sets a very personal writing tone that is more or less continued throughout the volume. This is evident not only in the way the author addresses the reader but also in the use of her very own experience, in the modern southwestern United States, to illustrate how experienced landscapes shape(d) human perception and decisions.
Chapter 2, ‘Big Game, Small Game: Why it Matters’, is dedicated to the definition of theoretical concepts that are important for a complete grasp of the volume's main ideas and outcomes. Through, for example, the explanation of the ‘dark age’ notion once used to classify the Mesolithic, the author contextualizes the historical emergence of the BSR theory, in the wake of Graham Clark's focus on human adaptations to climate change. Other concepts explored in this chapter include models based on evolutionary ecology perspectives and Optimal Foraging Theory, such as the prey choice model and the use of prey body-size as a favorite traditional proxy within the BSR. Some alternative perspectives to the traditional approaches to the model are also described, particularly focusing on how diverse factors such as prey mobility, energetic return, human innovation, and niche construction behaviors can all interfere with interpretations when applying the prey choice model.
One additional point that the author could have included, and that would have, in my opinion, enriched the chapter, would have been a mention of some of the alternative perspectives to the energy-dependent models of Optimal Foraging Theory. This is the case with the Nutritional Ecology model (Hockett & Haws, Reference Hockett and Haws2003), which has a more flexible position and incorporates variables that reflect the use of a diverse set of nutritional elements necessary for the sustainment and growth of a human group.
In the third chapter, ‘Climate and Environment in Late Paleolithic Southwest Europe’, a review of the palaeoclimate and palaeoenvironmental records for Late Palaeolithic southwest Europe is presented. In the first section, the author refers to how past climate can be studied through oxygen isotopes in ice and marine cores, and how regional environments are reconstructed using the fossil pollen record. In the second part, a very broad environmental characterization of Iberia, the Pyrenees, and southern France, during the timeframe of c. 29 ka bp to c. 10 ka bp, is presented. The main point of this chapter is to clarify that, based on palaeoenvironmental data, the region under study can be organized into three major palaeobioclimatic areas with different responses of flora, fauna, and humans to the same overall Late Pleistocene climatic events.
Chapter 4, ‘Human Subsistence and the Archaeofaunal Record of Late Paleolithic Southwest Europe’, is the first to deal with data analysis, exploring two lines of evidence—site location and archaeofaunal assemblages—to shed light on how humans adapt in each region through time and on whether there is evidence to support a BSR in any of the studied areas. The reasoning behind using site location as a valid variable for reconstructing mobility patterns and, from there, to track subsistence change is, in my opinion, very well-articulated. The author argues that, under the well-known residential/logistical continuum, hunter-gatherers frequently use elevation gradients to maximize access to different resource patches. Thus, the analysis of elevation variance across the three regions under study can inform on the existence (or not) of different subsistence strategies and its relationship with environmental changes. I think this approach is particularly interesting and refreshing in opposition to the traditional use of site counts as a proxy for population density increase used in previous studies.
Using a well-justified set of statistical tests, the author concludes that the three regions were home to hunter-gatherers with distinct mobility and subsistence patterns and that, with the exception of southern France during the Epipaleolithic, climate change did not significantly impact mobility patterns over time.
Regarding the archaeofaunal analysis, the author uses data from 141 discrete archaeological contexts from eighty-five sites to check for similarities in ungulate and lagomorph taxonomic distribution between the three biogeographic regions. It is noteworthy that most of the faunal data used in the study were not directly acquired by Jones, but rather obtained from a large number of publications. Typically, researchers should be rather cautious when dealing with data coming from such a diverse set of specialists. Nevertheless, the author seems to be perfectly aware of these problems, excluding from the study, for example, all assemblages containing lagomorphs that did not have a proper taphonomic investigation.
Both cluster analysis and non-metric multidimensional scaling were used to conclude, again, that subsistence choices were strongly resilient in each region through time, thus not attesting the existence of a ‘revolution’ of any kind. The exception seems to be southern France, where hunting practices likely suffered some transformations during the Epipaleolithic.
For this reason, Chapter 5, ‘Archaeofaunal Diversity and Broad Spectrum Diets in Late Paleolithic Southwest Europe’, takes the analysis further and presents the results of the various methods used to verify changes in the diversity of the species present in the sampled sites. The results of measures of richness and evenness are first presented, suggesting that differences detected in southern France during the Epipaleolithic are likely not due to an expansion of diet breadth but to a climate change-driven faunal turnover. To test this hypothesis, the author uses subsequently a ‘nestedness approach’ (using the metric called NODF, i.e. incidence-based nestedness by overlap and decreasing fills) to reach the same conclusion: French Epipaleolithic assemblages are unnested and, thus, BSR cannot be suggested, even for this region/phase.
The final Chapter 6, ‘Was there a Broad Spectrum Revolution in Southwest Europe?’, presents a summary of the main outcomes of the study, including a general characterization of each of the biogeographic areas addressed. Here, the author makes clear that, since subsistence changes seem not to have been driven by independent human demographic pressure but by episodes of environmental change and the alterations that these provoked in the physiography and biology of each region, the application of the traditional definition of the BSR model to southwestern Europe at the end of the Paleolithic is not viable.
While this is the core hypothesis for the volume and the results constitute a significant development for the Late Palaeolithic archaeology of these regions, I should say that, from a very personal point of view, those are not the most important outcomes for future research. Instead, I would rather emphasize the fact that all data analyzed by the author suggest that ‘hunter-gatherers responded to […] changes regionally, developing a mosaic of adaptations to climate variability rather than following a unilinear trajectory’ (p. 83). Although not completely new, the suggestion that southwestern Europe was structured in discrete territories during the Upper Palaeolithic, sometimes relatively isolated from each other—forming what Schmidt et al. (Reference Schmidt, Bradtmöller, Kehl, Pastoors, Tafelmaier, Weninger and Weniger2012) have called a ‘leopard-coat’ pattern—, is an important factor for further studies on how the adaptive systems of these populations have worked at different scales. When conjugated with the technological idiosyncrasies separating regions as showed by, for example, Cascalheira (Reference Cascalheira2013) for Iberia, a very different perspective on the homogeneity of each techno-complex and on the set of human ecodynamics by which they are traditionally defined should be revealed.
