British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

 

BA PDF Symposium 2004: Abstracts

21 April 2004

Dr Nellie Phoca-Cosmetatou

Late Glacial Subsistence: Is ‘Broadening the Food Spectrum’ the Only Path Available?

The period of the Late Glacial (15,000-10,000BP) starts at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum and ends with the advent of postglacial conditions, similar to present day ones. It is a period that witnessed major environmental changes and fluctuations on a rapid scale.

How did people cope in the face of these changed and changing conditions?

Most of the past work that has tried to answer this question has approached it either from a later day perspective, through a comparison with subsistence strategies during the Mesolithic, or from a Near Eastern perspective, through a comparison with economic and social processes leading to domestication. It is through such comparisons that the notion of a ‘broadening of the food spectrum’, i.e. of an increase in the range of resources Late Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers exploited, has been formulated and understood.

This paper will critically examine the notion of a diet breadth increase and its connotations. It will then proceed to explore subsistence practices during the Late Glacial across various regions of Southern Europe, including Italy and the Iberian peninsula, the aim being to assess how similar people’s reactions were to the changed and changing ecological conditions they faced.

Dr. Nellie Phoca-Cosmetatou is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Archaeology and a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Her archaeological interests centre around past human responses to difficult, marginal, and unpredictable ecological conditions. She has been carrying out research on settlement and subsistence systems in Southern Europe towards the end of the Upper Palaeolithic. She has also applied her faunal skills to island archaeology and to early human occupation of the East Mediterranean islands during the Neolithic, as a Research Associate of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. She has presented several papers on her work, organised an international conference symposium and a number of her articles have already been published; forthcoming are further journal papers and an edited volume.