Collection
Fire as an Artifact—Advances in Paleolithic Combustion Structure Studies
- Submission status
- Closed
Hearths present sedimentary features, artifacts, and direct evidence for maintained and controlled fire in the past. The use of hearths reflects regular access to fire and its diverse benefits. Among these benefits are cooked food, protection from the cold and from predators, and fire’s transformative power regarding raw materials. Hearths may have also served as focal points of activity at Paleolithic campsites and triggered changes in social structures. As sedimentary features, combustion structures function as behavioral as well as paleoenvironmental archives. The papers in this special issue focus on the former aspect, how combustion feature can serve as transmitters of behavior, and with what tools we can explore them. We here briefly present an overview on the range of topics explored in these papers, which include ethnoarchaeological research on fire use among recent hunter-gatherer groups, spatial analysis of burnt lithics, actualistic experiments regarding fire function and fire use in tool production.
Articles (6 in this collection)
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Where’s the Fire? Detection of Combustions Features and Analysis of Hearth-Centered Activity Areas with Lithic Analysis from the Aurignacian in Šalitrena pećina, Serbia
Authors
- Senka Plavšić
- Sofija Dragosavac
- Bojana Mihailović
- Content type: OriginalPaper
- Published: 15 September 2020
- Pages: 585 - 611
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A Cross-cultural Survey of On-site Fire Use by Recent Hunter-gatherers: Implications for Research on Palaeolithic Pyrotechnology
Authors
- Brea McCauley
- Mark Collard
- Dennis Sandgathe
- Content type: OriginalPaper
- Published: 12 March 2020
- Pages: 566 - 584
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Assessing the Function of Palaeolithic Hearths: Experiments on Intensity of Luminosity and Radiative Heat Outputs from Different Fuel Sources
Authors
- Sally Hoare
- Content type: OriginalPaper
- Open Access
- Published: 10 January 2020
- Pages: 537 - 565
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Experimenting the Use of Fire in the Operational Chain of Prehistoric Wooden Tools: the Digging Sticks of Poggetti Vecchi (Italy)
Authors (first, second and last of 5)
- Anna Revedin
- Stefano Grimaldi
- Biancamaria Aranguren
- Content type: OriginalPaper
- Published: 17 December 2019
- Pages: 525 - 536
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Fire and “Noise” in Late Paleolithic Camps: an Investigation of Issues in Locating Hearths
Authors
- Iwona Sobkowiak-Tabaka
- Aleksandr Diachenko
- Content type: OriginalPaper
- Open Access
- Published: 09 December 2019
- Pages: 509 - 524