Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PeOPLE (Personal Ornaments in the Palaeolithic of Europe)
Reporting period: 2018-02-01 to 2020-01-31
These kinds of studies are important for society because they help to test widespread assumptions about past human societies. Often, Upper Palaeolithic societies – and populations – are put into a series of named ""boxes"" that do not truly reflect the complexity of cultural processes in the past. These overly simplistic ideas about how human society worked in the past can in turn give rise to damaging assumptions about the ""natural"" or ""normal"" state of human society and human interactions. Archaeologists have a responsibility to find better ways to describe the true complexity of the processes that took place in the past, and this project forms one small part of this endeavour.
The overall objectives of this project include the following:
- Creation of the first database of Upper Palaeolithic personal ornaments in Eastern Europe and surrounding regions
- Analysis of this data using statistical and network analysis methods
- Comparison of the results with the traditional framework used for the classification of sites and assemblages and investigation of the differences between them"