Gravettian

Will return to Santa Cruz between 1714 and 1732 next Sunday. Now, back to life in early Spain and in areas that preceded the Clovis culture.

The Gravettian arose around 30,000 years ago when the climate supported pine and spruce on lands dominated by steppe vegetation. It lasted until the severe cold of the last glacial maximum which began about 22,000 years ago.

Along the Danube, groups at Willendorf, Dolní Vìstonice and Pavlov depended on mammoths. To their west and in Ukraine, bands relied on reindeer. On the Iberian and Italian peninsulas people ate red and roe deer. North of the Black Sea they hunted bison and horses.

On the map below, the Danube is traced in red. The Willendorf site is about 50 miles west in Austria. Dolní Vìstonice and Pavlov are a few miles apart on the Czech side of the Morava river that flows along the border between the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Archeologists found a female figure carved from limestone and stained with red ochre at Willendorf in 1908. In 1924, others found clay figurines of women at Dolní Vìstonice. Few had heads, arms or feet. Marianna Gvozdover noted the statuettes found to the east emphasized breasts and bellies. Those found in the south of France exaggerated thighs and hips. The ones from the Danube were less schematic.

The statuettes captured the popular imagination, but archaeologists saved all the clay remnants. Recently, Olga Soffer recognized patterns on some of the pieces that suggested basketry or cordage. They provided more detailed information about how people survived on open sites instead of in the caves and rock shelters used in Iberia.

At Pavlov, Bohuslav Klíma had uncovered a 33' x 20' swallow depression with the remains of burned posts. Inside, the hearth was surrounded by a wall of mammoth bones. Another depression in the area was surrounded by bones. It contained four hearths, with seven nearby. He postulated they had erected frames over the areas and covered them with hides. Soffer’s team found evidence of plant fibers in the dried clay that suggested they had daubed the interiors.

Some of the clay fragments from Dolní Vìstonice suggested plant materials had been plaited into mats. They speculated they could have been used on the floor where their weaves pressed into the clay. When the structure burned, the clay was fired for posterity.

Stoffer’s team also found evidence of cordage. Four pieces from Pavlov and two from Dolní Vìstonice had been knotted. That suggested they were making nets.

The bones found at Dolní Vìstonice came from woolly mammoth, horse, grey wolf, reindeer and arctic hare. At Pavlov there were reindeer, arctic hare, grey wolf, arctic fox and mammoth. Jirí Svoboda suspected there may have been more mammoths at Pavlov, but that erosion on one side of the site may have destroyed them.

Hares and foxes weren’t easy to kill with hand-held stone weapons. Their bones suggested cooperative, if not communal, hunts that allowed groups to come together and still have enough to eat. According to Miriam Nývltová-Fisáková, they also used many different bones from arctic foxes and grey wolves for tools. The ulna in the forelegs of red foxes and arctic hares were used for awls and barbs.

The long, narrow stone blades were part of the Pavlovian regional variant of the Gravettian. Svoboda believed their origins lay in the Levant around 40,000 years ago. Tsenka Tsanova found the technology had reached Kozarnika cave along the lower Danube in present-day Bulgaria between 39,000 and 33,000 years ago. Tool makers used large fragments of long bones to finish the edges.

What was remarkable about the blades wasn’t their form, but their raw material. The stones weren’t local. Svoboda discovered the flint and radiolarite used at Pavlov came from the other side of the watershed between the Baltic and the Danube. At Willendorf, Philip Nigst said they used local chert and brought flint from the far north.

Bands from Pavlov and Dolní Vìstonice no doubt followed mammoth trails, if not mammoths, from their Danube camps up the tributaries of the Morava river to its headwaters in the Carpathian mountains and then through the Moravian Gate to the plains on the other side. Today’s pass is at an altitude of 1,020 feet.

Notes:
Guadelli, Aleta, et alia. "The Retouchers from the Gravettian Levels in Kozarnika Cave," International Conference of Archaeozoology, Worked Bone Research Group, biennial meeting, 2011.

Gvozdover, M. D. "The Typology of Female Figurines of the Kostenki Paleolithic Culture," Soviet Anthropology and Archaeology 27:32-94:1989; cited by Soffer (2000).

Hitchcock, Don. "Dolní Vìstonice and Pavlov Sites," Don’s Maps website.

Jochim, Michael. "The Upper Paleolithic" in Sarunas Milisauskas, European Prehistory, 2011 second edition.

Klíma, Bohuslav. Work discussed by Svoboda (1994).

Musil, Rudolf. "Animal Prey," in Svoboda (2005); cited by Svoboda (2007).

Nigst, Philip R. "Willendorf II: Geography and Culture," in Claire Smith, Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, 2014.

Nývltová-Fisáková, M. "Animal Bones Selected for Tools and Decorations" in Svoboda (2005).

Soffer, O., J. M. Adovasio, and D. C. Hyland. "The ‘Venus’ Figurines: Textiles, Basketry, Gender, and Status in the Upper Paleolithic," Current Anthropology 41:511-537:2000.

_____, _____, _____, B. Klíma, and J. Svoboda. " Perishable Industries from Dolní Vìstonice I: New Insights into the Nature and Origin of the Gravettian," Society for American Archaeology, annual meeting, 1998.

_____, _____, and B. Klíma. "Upper Palaeolithic Fibre Technology: Interlaced Woven Finds from Pavlov I, Czech Republic, c. 26,000 Years Ago," Antiquity 70:526-534:1996.

Svoboda, Jirí. "The Pavlov Site, Czech Republic: Lithic Evidence from the Upper Paleolithic," Journal of Field Archaeology 21:69-81:1994.

_____. "Gravettian Mammoth Bone Deposits in Moravia," The World of Elephants International Congress, 2001; cited by Hitchcock.

_____. Pavlov I - Southeast. A Window into the Gravettian Lifestyles, 2005.

_____. "The Gravettian on the Middle Danube," Paleo 19:203-220:2007; included comments on origins in Levant and Bulgaria.

Tsanova T. Les Débuts du Paléolithique Supérieur dans l’st des Balkans, 2006; cited by Svoboda (2007).

Graphics: Geologik, "Flow of the Danube River," uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, 12 February 2007, based on map from United States, Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook.