Kobusiewicz, M. and Kabaciński, J. (eds), 2007, “Studies in the Final Palaeolithic Settlement of the Great European Plain”. Hb, 208pp, numerous figs, ISBN 978-83-89959-85-0, price unknown. Poznań: Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poznań Branch & Poznań Prehistoric Society. Reviewed by: Alan Saville, National Museums Scotland, June 2012.

Kobusiewicz, M. and Kabaciński, J. (eds), 2007, “Studies in the Final Palaeolithic Settlement of the Great European Plain”

This volume of 14 contributions results from the ‘Late Palaeolithic of the Great European Plain – New Discoveries and Ideas’ conference held in Poznań in 2003. The conference took place within the framework of the International Union for Pre- and Proto-historical Sciences (UISPP) Commission XXXII on ‘The Final Palaeolithic of the Great European Plain’ and represented the fifth meeting since the Commission was established in 1998. This Commission has been particularly productive in producing accessible publications summarising recent research and giving regional overviews (see Street et al 2009), and the present volume is a good example of this.

Late Palaeolithic evidence from Poland is at the heart of this volume, being the topic considered by six of the contributions, while single chapters relate to evidence from parts of Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Russia, Slovakia, and Sweden respectively, leaving two contributions which are not restricted to one particular country. Irrespective of the first language of any of the authors the whole volume is in English (without summaries of any chapters in any other language), and for the most part the translation is good or adequate, though the English of the contribution by Burdukiewicz et al on the ‘Palaeoenvironmental setting of the Late Paleolithic sites in Kopanica Valley [Poland]’ perhaps makes for the most difficult reading in the book.

Primarily the authors in this volume are concerned with questions of chronology and cultural attribution, in a context of relatively few radiocarbon-dated sequences or archaeological assemblages with clear-cut palaeoenvironmentally fixed signatures. One point of general agreement, which has since been confirmed in more recent studies, is that while the classic Hamburgian has a definite presence in Poland, in its later Havelte manifestation it has a more restricted westerly distribution. It may be too simplistic to tie the extent of the classic Hamburgian to the early Lateglacial range of its major prey species, the reindeer, but in the interesting contribution here by Jungner et al reporting on radiocarbon dates for reindeer from Latvia, it is apparent that this species does not occur there until post-Hamburgian Allerød times.

Chapters which cover particular aspects of Lateglacial culture include: Migal ‘On preferential points of the Final Palaeolithic in the Central European Lowland’, in which he detects careful specialised core preparation to produce pointed flakes in Gravettian, Lyngby, Swiderian, and Desnenian contexts, but not in others; Sulgostowska who looks at evidence for the use of ochre in Lateglacial Poland, including traces on the intriguing decorated antler pendant fragment from Ruska Skała; and Schild et al who attempt to get to grips with understanding ‘village’ life at the Rydno site complex in southern Poland where numerous separate Final Palaeolithic occupation units have been excavated.

Inevitably in a field in which research is moving fast, not least because of the efforts of those associated with Commission XXXII (and including new papers by many of the authors represented here), some of the work and conclusions reported in this volume have been overtaken by more recent publications. Nevertheless, this collection will continue to have a value, particularly because of its copious illustrations and the fact that it acts as a guide in English to a wealth of data otherwise only published in a wide range of European languages.

On a final point, while the production standard of the volume is high, with a mixture of colour and black-and-white illustration, it has one major failing, very unusual in a hardback book these days, in that it has no text at all on its plain blue spine. This in part explains my delay in producing this review – the book got lost on the shelf!
Reference

Street, M., Terberger, T. and Barton, N. 2009. References and exhaustive bibliography of previous meetings of UISPP Commission XXXII. In M. Street, N. Barton and T. Terberger (eds), Humans, Environment and Chronology of the Late Glacial of the North European Plain, 2-6. Mainz: Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums (RGZM – Tagungen, Band 6).