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Palaeoanthropologists and evolutionary psychologists have successfully used the increasing size of the brain during human evolution to infer cognitive and social outcomes. Archaeologists have applied similar reasoning to the development of technology in deep history. This paper goes beyond these approaches by considering the house as a metaphor for the structure of hominin minds. It is argued that the study of the mind in deep history requires, (1) a recognition that mind is distributed between bodies, brains, and the world. The implications are examined through a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study (that unwraps the cerebellum and which suggests that folding rather than cortex size may be more important for understanding cognition.; (2) unmasking the ingrained container-habitus that has been used to describe and investigate minds either in the present or deep past. This bias is explored by entering the eccentric house-mind of Sir John Soane (1753-1837) with its many compartments, paintings, and antiquities; and (3) an exploration of alternative embodied metaphors to enable archaeologists to study distributed mind in deep history. The metaphor ARCHITECTURE WITHOUT WALLS is discussed and briefly compared to the evidence for ‘houses’ in the Middle and Upper Pleistocene. The evidence indicates that hominins have always had complex, distributed minds but only recently in our deep history did we come to think predominantly through and with artificial containers such as houses. Late in human history these constructions became a common-sense habitus that expressed and fashioned our cognitive experience of the world.

Hominin dispersal and human colonization have been hallmark concepts in the last two decades of palaeanthropological research,1–7 even though the terminology in these approaches is loosely defined (Box 1). The number, frequency, and routes of dispersal have been analyzed on a global scale,8 beginning with the earliest movement of hominins between Africa and Asia, and back again.9 Investigating dispersals has provided a much-needed dynamic to account for recent human origins in Africa10 and the replacement elsewhere of older regional hominin populations that include the Neanderthals.11 In the last twenty years, phylogeographies based on a wealth of molecular studies have added enormously to our understanding of global population history from the Paleolithic to the Vikings12 and has, in particular, revitalized the study of farming dispersals.13 As a result, Quaternary hominins and humans have been on the move as never before. However, not all of these movements are considered within an evolutionary framework. Interest has focused instead on using dispersals to support the claims for either a Neolithic or human revolution as the turning point in human prehistory. Here, I explore an alternative by considering the implications of the major shift that occurred in Paleolithic technology from instruments to containers.14 I argue that this development can be explained by the selective pressure from population dispersal for novel forms of cultural display that enhanced information exchange among adaptive generalists and which allowed the stretching of social relationships in space and time.15 The British Paleolithic record provides a case study.

The site at Red Barns was excavated in 1975, but the large lithic collection remained unstudied following preliminary examination. This paper reports on further analysis of the lithic material from the site, together with a reappraisal of the faunal remains and original mineralogical analyses, and the results of processing sediment samples from the 1975 excavation. An abundant molluscan assemblage was recovered from the deposits covering the main archaeological horizon, allowing climatic/environmental reconstruction and amino acid dating. The synthesis of these data indicates the site to be older than previously thought, dating to between 425,000 and 200,000 BP.Analysis of the lithic material has suggested that the site is an undisturbed palimpsest of flint tools and debitage. The poor, severely frost-fractured nature of the raw material used for knapping, together with the location of the site on a Chalk outcrop, have enabled investigation of some assumptions about the influences upon knapping technology of i) poor quality raw material and ii) local availability of flint fresh from Chalk bedrock. The persistent manufacture of finely worked plano-convex handaxes suggests that, even in an area where fresh Chalk flint must have been abundant, the immediately available poor quality flint source was not a bar to formation of an assemblage dominated by handaxe production. Secondly, the emphasis on carefully shaped pointed plano-convex handaxes suggests that this shape was both deliberately imposed and not dictated by a lack of local availability of flint fresh from the Chalk. Behaviour at the site was investigated by analysis of the organisation of the lithic production and it was demonstrated that, while some handaxes and flake-tools were abandoned at the site and some flake core reduction also took place there, the dominant pattern was for handaxes to be made at the site and then removed and abandoned elsewhere.

This paper examines, through the use of Accelerator Mass Spectrometry dating, the database of Lateglacial cultures involved in the recolonisation of northern Europe. The aim is not only to determine the timing of that recolonisation, but also to propose a general model of hunter-gatherer colonisation at a sub-continental scale. The question is addressed of how long the period of abandonment of northern Europe during the Würm/Weichsel glaciation may have lasted, and when it both started and came to an end. A series of questions is asked concerning the processes and mechanics of recolonisation and the sequences for specific areas are examined. AMS radiocarbon dating shows that a two stage process was involved, which has important implications for our analysis of regional settlement patterns and the changing scale of Lateglacial hunting systems. Recolonisation was a dynamic process, integral to, and internally driven by, the social life of Lateglacial hunters. It may have been constrained by environmental and resource factors, which we have emphasised here, but ultimately it was an historical, social process and should be similarily regarded to that of the farmers. By measuring rates of expansion data are provided for use in other studies of hunter-gatherer colonisation.

My aim in this paper is to put the question, ‘Where was the centre of the Upper Palaeolithic world?’. I promise no answers and I will confine the discussion to Europe.The purpose behind raising such a seemingly irrelevant problem is that its investigation leads us directly into issues of palaeolithic society, the interpretation of art in such contexts and the often opposed views of how art contributed to adaptation and change.At the outset let me declare that I amnotdealing with the origins of art and its association, or not, with language. Art for me is, however, a system of communication and includes a wide range of mediums and messages. As an act of social communication it is defined by style which, as Wiessner (1984, 191) argues, has its behavioural basis in a fundamental human cognitive process; personal and social identification through comparison. Consequently style is not just a means of transmitting information about identity but is an active tool used in building social strategies (ibid.194). It has a role in negotiation which, as I shall argue below, is the basis for defining palaeolithic society.

This paper sets out the detailed stratigraphy and chronology of the palaeolithic rockshelters of Asprochaliko and Kastritsa excavated in the 1960s, the methods used by the original investigators in excavation and classification of the finds, and the general characteristics of the stone industries and fauna. Methods of estimating the density of finds are discussed. Estimates of time density — the number of specimens accumulated per unit area per unit time — are applied to the upper palaeolithic deposits at both sites and reveal major differences in the rate of discard of material, indicating more intensive occupation at Kastritsa. Inter-site differences in the proportion of faunal species and artefact types are analysed in the light of the time-density evidence, and the various factors that could have influenced the pattern of inter-site variation are discussed.

It is now generally recognised that the activity known as hunting is a complex but predictable adaptation of small social units to the variable structure of the environment. In the last decade we have passed from the model of the hunter as a ‘catch-as-catch-can’ opportunist to an appreciation of his ability to exploit resources in both a systematic and efficient manner (Wilmsen 1973; Williams 1974; Jochim 1976). The investigation of how hunting decisions are made has led to a fuller appreciation of the component parts of this particular lifestyle, with the result that attention has shifted from technology, as the principal interest, to considerations of resource exploitation, demography, settlement location, interaction, and mating networks (Higgs 1976; Wobst 1974, 1976). In particular the differing adaptations of hunter-gatherer groups have been examined in relation to variations in the global ecosystem which shows a spatial succession of habitat types, grading from generalised to specialised, between the equatorial tropics and the arctic poles (Harris 1969; Yellen and Harpending 1972). While this is a most convenient framework for predicting many variable features of hunter-gatherer organisation, e.g. territory size and cultural patterning, its extreme generality obscures the options that exist within ecosystems at the smaller scale of local adaptation. Thus, far from confining hunting outcomes to broad eco-determinism, decisions made by hunting bands will be influenced by immediate features of the environment such as the location of grazing areas and the configurations of relief. The outcomes as seen in settlement patterns and demographic arrangements may well resemble, at a local level, the expected pattern as influenced by generalised environmental conditions, while viewed at a wider scale the prevailing environment might be highly specialised (Gamble 1978b, 181). The purpose of this paper is to examine, by means of a case study, a comparative structure for palaeolithic hunting strategies that involved the exploitation of large mammals.