Environmental history of the Middle Palaeolithic site "Mutzig-Rain" (Alsace, France): First synthesis of a multidisciplinary approach

Description

During Prehistory, the European territories challenged numerous climatic changes of varying intensity and frequency. Therefore, understanding how these variations modified the ecosystems and landscapes and how ancient societies faced these latter are critical issues for prehistorians. Unfortunately, local or regional data on short-term recording of the climatic and environmental fluctuations are still lacking in many areas.The early Upper Pleistocene of Alsace particularly illustrates this lack, with precise chronological constraints in the continental sequences or only a handful of sites reliably attributed to the Middle Palaeolithic. The Mutzig site, occupied during the early Weichselian Glacial (MIS 5, around 90,000 BP), is thus an exceptional site, where the very good preservation of the deposits and archaeological remains makes it possible to address questions relating to the Neanderthals/environment relationship at high temporal resolution .We provide here a first environmental reconstruction of the Mutzig occupations, based on a multidisciplinary and original approach associating anthracology, isotopic signal (δ13C) on charcoal, microfauna, fauna and sedimentology. The first results show relatively cold steppe-like environmental context over most of the sequence (levels 5 and 7) which tends towards milder conditions at its base (levels 9 and 10). At higher resolution, the complementarity of the signals used has allowed us to highlight a discontinuous evolution between levels, particularly marked by changes in humidity.

Abstract

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