Finding Home: A cross-cultural approach to Late Pleistocene shelters

Shelters are an important cultural feature of human societies. Elements of shelter construction are also well-documented among our closest living relatives, the great apes, highlighting a potential phylogenetic trend of these behaviours. However, looking at our species' deep past, archaeological evidence for shelters is sparse. This may result from a poor understanding of what past shelters looked like and where to identify them archaeologically. Posited evidence for shelters comes mainly from post hoc analyses of known sites, and reconstructions of their appearance are often based on little information. We will use diverse ethnographic accounts to create a database of shelters built by forager societies. We expect to detect patterns in the ways foragers situate, design, and make use of shelters. Based on these patterns, our objective is to create a frame of reference to recognise and meaningfully interpret archaeological traces left by Late Pleistocene (ca. 120–12 ka) hominins. These patterns will be used to build a predictive spatial model to locate prehistoric shelters beyond known sites. The model will indicate where to look for shelters and what to expect. We will test it with systematic, large-scale geomagnetic surveys in East-Central Europe. Identifying and describing prehistoric shelters has important consequences for understanding how past hominins lived and spread during the unpredictable climate fluctuations of the Late Pleistocene. Clarifying shelter use will offer a better understanding of how hominins coped with vast, non-karstic landscapes. This will provide insights into shelters’ role within the social and cultural dynamics of past people.