This research aims to test the hypothesis that portable art objects and ornaments were used to create and maintain social networks between groups of hunter-gatherers coping with climatic insecurity. This is tested through the materials used to produce such objects. The results of tests indicate that the movement of objects of portable art and ornaments did not correlate with climatic values such as precise temperature and variance of temperature, which goes against the assumptions of the main hypothesis mentioned above. However, the variation in the production of these objects correlates well with broad climatic changes and with demographic events. This suggests that portable art objects and ornaments might have been used to a certain extent to help facilitate the population movements that were themselves affected by climate change. / Graduate

abstract: This dissertation uses a comparative approach to investigate long-term human- environment interrelationships in times of climate change. It uses Geographical Information Systems and ecological models to reconstruct the Magdalenian (~20,000- 14,000 calibrated years ago) environments of the coastal mountainous zone of Cantabria (Northwest Spain) and the interior valleys of the Dordogne (Southwest France) to contextualize the social networks that could have formed during a time of high climate and resource variability. It simulates the formation of such networks in an agent-based model, which documents the processes underlying the formation of archaeological assemblages, and evaluates the potential impacts of climate-topography interactions on cultural transmission. This research then reconstructs the Magdalenian social networks visible through a multivariate statistical analysis of stylistic similarities among portable art objects. As these networks cannot be analyzed directly to infer social behavior, their characteristics are compared to the results of the agent-based model, which provide characteristics estimates of the Magdalenian latent social networks that most likely produced the empirical archaeological assemblage studied. This research contributes several new results, most of which point to the advantages of using an inter-disciplinary approach to the study of the archaeological record. It demonstrates the benefits of using an agent-based model to parse social data from long- term palimpsests. It shows that geographical and environmental contexts affect the structure of social networks, which in turn affects the transmission of ideas and goods that flow through it. This shows the presence of human-environment interactions that not only affected our ancestors’ reaction to resource insecurities, but also led them to innovate and improve the productivity of their own environment. However, it also suggests that such alterations may have reduced the populations’ resilience to strong climatic changes, and that the region with diverse resources provided a more stable and resilient environment than the region transformed to satisfy the immediate needs of its population. / Dissertation/Thesis / Appendix_D_Sites_Dates / Appendix_E_Flowchart_Biome_Reconstruction / Appendix_H_Flowchart_ABM / Appendix_I_Flowchart_Social_Network / Appendix_J_Portable_Art_Objects / Appendix_J_Art_Characteristics / Appendix_L_Poster_Summary / Appendix_A_Prehistoric_Fauna / Appendix_B_Modern_PFT_Distribution / Appendix_C_Prehistoric_PFT_Distribution / Doctoral Dissertation Anthropology 2017

L’archéologie paléolithique peine à esquisser la complexité des sociétés humaines. Le principal obstacle qui demeure concerne les réalités sociales, culturelles, et finalement humaines, que sous-tendent les vestiges qu’elle exhume. La méthode élaborée dans le cadre de cette thèse a pour ambition de compléter la réflexion menée sur la définition des « cultures » et des « territoires » préhistoriques, en les abordant du point de vue des unités sociales et de leurs dynamiques. Cette étude s’est également efforcée de réviser l’analyse des styles et le rôle des objets ornés dans les dynamiques sociales des chasseurs-cueilleurs préhistoriques. À cette fin, la réflexion menée repose sur un postulat fondamental : le fait anthropologique que la culture matérielle est partie prenante des processus d’identification et d’interactions sociales, à la fois participant et étant influencée par ces comportements. Le style des objets (manière de faire) et leur répartition dépendent donc des interactions entre individus et groupes, en lien étroit avec leur environnement naturel et social. Il est donc fait appel à des récurrences anthropologiques qui fournissent des clés de lecture pour la distribution et l’évolution des styles de la culture matérielle au regard des contextes et dynamiques sociales qui en sont responsables. Cette méthode est testée sur une approche synchronique et diachronique des objets ornés du Magdalénien, mis au jour dans le centre-ouest de la France (environ 18 000 à 12 000 ans BP). Cette étude est complétée d’une discussion transdisciplinaire des hypothèses interprétatives ainsi formulées. / Palaeolithic archaeology struggles to reach human societies complexity. The main issue relates to social, cultural, and overall human realities underlying the excavated remains. The methodology herein developed aims at clarifying the characterization of prehistoric “cultures” and “territories” by approaching them through social units and their dynamics. Moreover, the present study endeavours to revise style analysis and the part played by ornamented goods within prehistoric hunter-gatherers’ social interactions. The keystone to this issue relies on the anthropological fact that material culture is “an active constitutive dimension of social practice in that it both structures human agency and is a product of that agency” (Jones, 1997). Consequently, its styles depend on interaction modalities and evolution, in relation to their natural and social environment (mainly resources and human demography). Therefore, this research invokes social anthropology’s recurrences which provide a fundamental framework to interpret distribution and changes of styles depending on the context and social dynamics influences. The present methodology is experimented on a synchronic and diachronic approach of Magdalenian portable art from western central France (ca. 18 000 to 12 000 years BP). This study is completed by a transdisciplinary discussion of the herein devised interpretative hypotheses.

This thesis is focused on the material known as the Mesolithic portable art. Earlier research have interpreted the material as representative art relating to ideology, mythology, prestige, ritual practices,and tribalism. Such interpretations are based on theoretical frameworks that build on hylomorphism and Cartesian metaphysics. By a change of theoretical framework, to a new animistic perspective based on a combination of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizome theory, Tim Ingold’s meshwork and Giordano Bruno’s theory of bonds in general, followed by the use of ChantalConneller’s method rhizomatic chaîne opératoire, I conclude that the motifs on the tools and pendants are communications to the animated subjects that make up and inhabit the environment. Furthermore, I conclude that the binary positions of function and ritual cannot be applied when studying the formgenerating process of this material, as the tools and pendants along with their applied motifs are a result of what is in between these binary positions.