Rethinking the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition: from human migrations to settlement systems during MIS 3 via the example of the Pyrenees – TransPyr

This project aims to investigate the conditions associated with the arrival of Homo sapiens and the advent of the Upper Palaeolithic in Western Europe via an approach that combines palaeoenvironmental and archaeological studies. The use of the Northern Pyrenees as a case study reflects a desire to articulate a high-resolution continental palaeoenvironmental reconstruction with one of the main European archaeological reference areas for this period, situated between circa 50- and 30 000-years BP (From Late Mousterian to Aurignacian, via the Châtelperronian and the Protoaurignacian). The objective, through concerted analyses crossing geoarchaeology (conditions of site formation), archaeology (exploitation of both mineral and animal resources), and the environmental sciences, is to test our ability to describe and finely interpret the links that prehistoric populations had with their environment, which appears to be an essential key to interpreting the behavioral evolution during this period. By elaborating a dynamic model describing the complex and multiple relations that prehistoric societies had with their environments, we will enrich two complementary scales of analysis and reflection: that of the veritable movement, i.e., migration, of populations at a macro-historical (and therefore macro-regional) scale, and that of the movement of populations within their territories, i.e., the socio-economic organization of nomadic peoples, at a palaeoethnological and near historical scale. Articulating these distinct scales of analysis is essential in order to gain critical perspective on the conditions and adaptive constraints faced by the first societies of Homo sapiens in this particular part of the world.