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The Late Upper Palaeolithic Hamburgian tradition reflects the earliest known human presence in northern Europe after the Last Glacial Maximum. We report here on the open-air site of Jels 3 (Denmark) and its associated stone tool assemblage, which can be unambiguously attributed to this period. Along with only a handful of other sites, Jels 3 represents the northernmost limits of human expansion in Europe at this time. We conduct a technological analysis of the lithic material from Jels 3 and other relevant sites to shed new light on the behavioral processes that likely underwrote this expansion. Given that sites dating to this initial dispersal remain few, are restricted to certain geographic regions, and represent an overall lack of a well-developed settlement hierarchy, we suggest that this dispersal process is most commensurable with the earlier stages of a leap-frogging colonization targeting specific landscape elements and that it was quite possibly very short-lived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the notion of landscape learning has been the object of increasing attention when discussing the neolithization of Europe. The landscape learning model stresses the necessity of gathering environmental information about a previously unfamiliar region. Therefore, it is particularly relevant in cases where the beginning of a farming economy is better explained in relation to the movements of peoples (colonization), rather than to the adoption of crops and livestock by pre-existing hunters and gatherers (acculturation). Unlike other Iberian regions, where the adoption of agriculture runs parallel to that of animal husbandry, the available data on the neolithization process of the Sierra de Gredos mountain range seem to suggest that raising livestock may have preceded plant cultivation. Based on an interdisciplinary and multi-proxy approach, this paper explores the idea that the adoption of a food-producing economy in the Amblés Valley (Ávila, Central Iberia) may have been connected with pastoralism. In this context, landscape learning provides a model for analyzing how Early Neolithic herders in their seasonal movements were capable of wayfinding by memorizing spatial features that functioned as visual landmarks.

Drawing on scholarship in postcolonial archaeology that emphasizes the place of indigenous technology in colonial and imperial contexts, this article explores the role of local communities in esparto grass weaving and basketry in the southeast Iberian Peninsula in antiquity. Esparto crafting became essential to Phoenician and Carthaginian colonial economies of the 1st millennium BCE and, later, to the production equipment for mining and other industries under Roman imperial rule. This paper uses ethnographic studies alongside archaeological evidence of esparto objects, particularly esparto mining equipment, to reconstruct the chaîne opératoire of ancient esparto crafting. It argues that local communities developed landscape learning and tactile technical knowledge surrounding esparto crafting over many generations. In supplying equipment essential to Roman mining, these communities used their technical knowledge to maintain agency and construct their identities under imperial rule. Ultimately, understanding esparto crafting helps elucidate the relationship between resources, technology, and imperial or colonial encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has often been assumed that a link exists between climate change and human dispersion during the initial peopling of the Atacama Desert. However, there is little understanding of how hunter-gatherers acquired and processed environmental information. We examine paleoenvironmental and archaeological data to propose that the early peopling of the highlands of the south-central Atacama was a gradual process modulated by landscape learning. Evidence suggests that initial occupations at the end of the Pleistocene were limited to intermediate altitude levels, where the ecological structure was more easily legible and productive. This allowed human groups to make use of general, transferrable landscape knowledge, based mainly on the hunting of wild camelids and the gathering of plant resources in azonal formations. However, the arid event of the Early Holocene led to successive episodes of abandonment and relocation to new areas, consolidating complementary land-use between the desert lowlands and the high puna. Two complementary strategies for the acquisition and transmission of information can be identified: (1) scouting as part of logistical hunting parties; and (2) information-pooling rooted in broad, flexible social networks. We conclude that in the face of uncertain conditions, hunter-gatherers invested more effort in learning the landscape and sharing environmental knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The Dunedin Causeway was a timber corduroy path found in central Dunedin, New Zealand, during an archaeological investigation ahead of a mall development in 2008. The path was probably built by the first Scottish settlers to arrive in 1848, using timber cleared from the neighboring hills. Analysis of the timbers indicates that they were almost all waste species and, therefore, ideal for use in a temporary path. Using a landscape-learning framework, this article suggests that the first settlers very quickly learned about certain aspects of their new home, and this knowledge was probably acquired from publications and assistance from the few existing residents, both European and Maori (the indigenous inhabitants of New Zealand). The causeway represents the early settlers' physical efforts, their growing awareness of the landscape, the establishment of the city as an agent of colonization, and the acquisition of knowledge from local Maori, who were, perversely, being displaced by the same processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the first Americans to establish territories in the New World, the concept of remoteness must have differed considerably from later periods. The Middle Susitna Valley of south-central Alaska was sparsely occupied during the late Pleistocene and underwent millenia of marginal exploration by the earliest Alaskans prior to becoming fully colonized in the early Holocene. For most of prehistory the Susitna Valley was socially and economically “remote.” Disequilibrium dynamics likely influenced cultural adaptations in the Middle Susitna Valley, ultimately transforming a geographically remote location into a familiar place through experience. Reduced remoteness is manifested in cultural traditions that include trails, place names, material culture, and religious beliefs. In the case of the Middle Susitna region its remote position facilitated the maintenance of band level society political organization adjacent to developing social complexity along the coast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We develop a model for understanding the trade-off of mobility versus landscape learning on a new landscape. • Learning new resources is more likely when a novice's handling time, and average habitat returns, are relatively low. • Even for colonizers 'pre-adapted' to large game hunting, it was advantageous to learn about unfamiliar smaller game and plants. • Large game hunting does not favor the most frequent residential moves; pursuit of the rate-maximizing resource suite does. • Residential moves may have occurred more often after new resources were learned than they did upon initial arrival. The process(es) by which hunter-gatherers learned novel food resources as they dispersed across previously unknown landscapes, such as Late Pleistocene North America, are not known. A key trade-off in the process must have involved the decision, once high-ranked resources in a patch declined, to stay in place and learn about untried food resources or move to another patch to exploit familiar resources. Modelling the process suggests that learning a new resource will be more likely when the handling time for that resource by a novice forager is not too much higher than that for a practiced forager, and when patch residence times are long enough for within-patch resource depression to occur. The decision to move or stay would likely have varied depending on the richness and structure of the resources in different patches and habitats. The model further indicates it is not large mammal hunting per se that favors the most frequent residential moves by central place foragers, but rather the pursuit of the rate-maximizing suite of resources, whatever the composition of that suite may be. These findings imply, as previous empirical work has suggested, that the dispersal process likely played out in different ways across Late Pleistocene North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]