The prehistoric site of Le Placard, Southwest France, was first explored 150 years. 19th-century excavations almost emptied the cavity, now surprisingly ill-known. This 150-year milestone grants an opportunity to look back at this exceptional site and what it can tell us about the Late Pleistocene hunting and gathering societies who dwelt there.

This book undertakes a thorough study of Reindeer in the Upper Pleniglacial and Tardiglacial societies in France. It addresses two main topics – the economy of animal resources within the societies and the exploitation of Reindeer organized within the annual cycle, in terms of space and time, between 30,000 and 14,000 cal BP in France. The author proposes an analysis and hypothesis regarding the economy of animal resources and the nomadic cycle of the last Paleolithic hunter-gatherer societies, in order to identify a “Reindeer system.” The author discusses the relationship between Reindeer and human mobility and offers some conclusions regarding the annual cycles of nomadism. The volume scrutinizes the distinct eco systems in three regions and its effects on the movements of both human and animal. This book is of interest to zooarchaeologists and prehistorians.

Secret societies in tribal societies turn out to be key to understanding the origins of social inequalities and state religions.

This collective volume offers a variety of perspectives which come together to offer a comprehensive picture of chert procurement and exploitation in Prehistory in the Near East and the Levant. The contributions include geoarchaeological and geological surveys, mapping chert sources and quarry sites, placed in the broader context of lithic resources and exploitation in the region; case studies of specific sites; and the characterization of chert samples and archaeological finds through macroscopic, mineralogical and petrographic analysis. They also offer studies of the raw material selection and chaîne opératoire involved in lithic production using siliceous rocks, offering insights into the development of lithic technology and tool use in the region, from the earliest evidence through to the role of flint and chert in the technological and economic systems of Neolithic farming communities.

"Peking Man," a cave man once thought a great hunter who had first tamed fire, actually was a composite of the gnawed remains of some fifty women, children, and men unfortunate enough to have been the prey of the giant cave hyena. Researching the famous fossil site of Dragon Bone Hill in China, scientists Noel T. Boaz and Russell L. Ciochon retell the story of the cave's unique species of early human, Homo erectus. Boaz and Ciochon take readers on a gripping scientific odyssey. New evidence shows that Homo erectus was an opportunist who rode a tide of environmental change out Africa and into Eurasia, puddle-jumping from one gene pool to the next. Armed with a shaky hold on fire and some sharp rocks, Homo erectus incredibly survived for over 1.5 million years, much longer than our own species Homo sapiens has been on Earth. Tell-tale marks on fossil bones show that the lives of these early humans were brutal, ruled by hunger and who could strike the hardest blow, yet there are fleeting glimpses of human compassion as well. The small brain of Homo erectus and its strangely unchanging culture indicate that the species could not talk. Part of that primitive culture included ritualized aggression, to which the extremely thick skulls of Homo erectus bear mute witness. Both a vivid recreation of the unimagined way of life of a prehistoric species, so similar yet so unlike us, and a fascinating exposition of how modern multidisciplinary research can test hypotheses in human evolution, Dragon Bone Hill is science writing at its best.

Fifteen papers, eight from a session at the SAA meeting in Denver in 2002 on Natufian cultures and the others invited papers, examine various issues associated with the cultures of the late Pleistocene in the Near East. Adopting a largely theoretical approach, the volume focuses on `settlement patterns, mobility, patterns of natural resources exploitation, the place of the Natufian in the process toward food production, the complexity of its social organization between nomadic Epipalaeolithic bands of hunter-gatherers and sedentary farming Neolithic societies'. Mostly focusing on evidence from Jordan and the Levant, specific subjects include radiocarbon dating, scientific techniques to detect sedentism, the cultural geography of the Levant, Natufian dwelling structures, the domestication of the dog, plant food, Natufian skeletal remains, the model of Mesoamerican lime burning technology, Natufian socio-political organisation.