Eastern Central Europe’s earliest shelters

From penthouses to igloos, homes are a cornerstone of human society, deeply entrenched in our evolutionary past.

Their staggering array of architecture simultaneously shape and reflect our sociocultural traditions, structure our local economies, and have enabled us to inhabit all four corners of the earth. Yet surprisingly little is known about their earliest formsPalaeolithic shelters. This is because no systematic attempts have been made to target their early archaeological signatures.

HOME will search for a diversity of Palaeolithic shelters during the Late Pleistocene through informed systematic surveys and excavations of archaeological sites in East-Central Europe, a place where early mammoth bone structures suggest precocious shelters, but where the record remains inconclusive.

This projects goal is to uncover and assess a variety of Palaeolithic shelters with the aim to understand the diverse ways that humans lived and survived in some of the coldest, harshest climates.

The objectives are to: (1) Recognize the factors that influence the location and design of forager shelters through a goal-directed study of ethnographic documentation. (2) Develop new geophysical methods to identify open-air shelter residues in large-scale archaeological surveys. (3) Determine how one of the earliest unambiguous built structures, a mammoth bone structure, was used with the latest techniques in archaeological science. (4) Compare and contrast how these open-air shelters relate to a regional cave occupation through targeted excavations.

The results will elucidate how our ancestors adapted to past climate change and expanded into new biomes, ultimately leading to our ubiquitous population of the earth.

In addition to its significance to archaeology and anthropology, the outcomes have implications for theories of culture, evolution and human resilience by helping us understand the physical building blocks of early societies.