Claudine Gravel-Miguel

The New Mexico Consortium

Network research has recently been adopted as one of the tools of the trade in archaeology, used to study a wide range of topics: interactions between island communities, movements through urban spaces, visibility in past landscapes, material culture similarity, exchange, and much more. This Oxford Handbook is the first authoritative reference work...

We report the discovery and analysis of new Mesolithic human remains—dated to ca. 10,200–9000 cal. BP—from Arma di Nasino in Liguria, northwestern Italy, an area rich in Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic attestations, but for which little information on Early Holocene occupation was available. The multi-proxy isotopic profile of the two individuals r...

Southern Africa's Greater Cape Floristic Region (GCFR) – a hotspot of biological diversity and palaeo-anthropological evidence for modern human evolution – is a climatically complex region where broad climatic gradients influence the relative importance of plant photosynthetic types in local vegetation. This mix of photosynthetic pathways imprint a...

Anthropological and ethnographic research has shown the influence of climate and resource distribution on hunter-gatherer lifestyle. As a result, an increasing number of archaeologists have attempted to reconstruct past environments to understand behavior in its context. However, to this day, only a few have considered the possibility that hunter-g...

Unlabelled: Personal ornaments are widely viewed as indicators of social identity and personhood. Ornaments are ubiquitous from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene, but they are most often found as isolated objects within archaeological assemblages without direct evidence on how they were displayed. This article presents a detailed record of the...

Hunter–gatherers past and present live in complex societies, and the structure of these can be assessed using social networks. We outline how the integration of new evidence from cultural evolution experiments, computer simulations, ethnography, and archaeology open new research horizons to understand the role of social networks in cultural evoluti...

The origins and significance of an aquatic diet in hominin evolution is a scientific research topic of high significance. Some have argued that marine shellfish collection was a key ingredient in the emergence of modern human behavioral and cultural complexity. The collection of marine resources, which can be productive and predictable, may have ev...

We present 3D electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) imaging of the archaeological deposits at Arma Veirana cave (northern Italy), to date only partially explored. The archaeological importance of the cave is due to the presence of a rich Mousterian layer, traces of Late Upper Palaeolithic (Epigravettian) temporary occupations and an Early Mesolit...

The evolution and development of human mortuary behaviors is of enormous cultural significance. Here we report a richly-decorated young infant burial (AVH-1) from Arma Veirana (Liguria, northwestern Italy) that is directly dated to 10,211–9910 cal BP (95.4% probability), placing it within the early Holocene and therefore attributable to the early M...

Network science shows promise for archaeologists who want to explore past social dynamics using material culture. Yet, archaeological data is subject to important caveats that exist for all datasets. Almost all archaeological datasets are biased, and these biases are often unknown or only partially understood. Prior research has examined the effect...

The Arene Candide Cave is a renowned site on the northwestern Italian coast that has yielded numerous burials dating back to the terminal phases of the Pleistocene (Epigravettian culture). Thanks to the exceptional preservation of the remains, and to the information collected during the excavations that begun in the 1940s, researchers were able to...

The invention of projectile technology had important ramifications for hominin evolution. However, the number of stone points that could have been used as projectiles fluctuates in archaeological assemblages, making it difficult to define when projectile technology was first widely adopted and how its usage changed over time. Here we use an agent-b...

Chemical characterization of cryptotephra is critical for temporally linking archaeological sites. Here, we describe cryptotephra investigations of two Middle–Upper Paleolithic sites from north‐west Italy, Arma Veirana and Riparo Bombrini. Cryptotephra are present as small (<100 µm) rhyolitic glass shards at both sites, with geochemical signatures...

o When a hunter pursues a prey, they 'throw' the projectile point, which can either hit the prey or miss. o If it misses, it can hit a tree, a bush, or the ground, depending on the habitat of the cell in which the hunt takes place. o As points hit objects, parts of their edges become damaged. The probabilities and locations of damage are based on e...

Some of the earliest evidence for symbolic behaviour in human prehistory comes from personal adornments made from shells. More than 400 opercula from the terrestrial gastropod Revoilia guillainopsis, were found at the Middle Stone Age site of Porc-Epic in southeastern Ethiopia (Rosso et al., 2016). The opercula, unbroken except for a central perfor...

At the root of numerous archaeological research projects is a need to understand how mobility impacted the lives of our ancestors. Recent technological advances have made it easy for archaeologists to rely on Geographic Information Systems' least-cost path tools to identify the single easiest path to move between two points set in a realistically r...

This paper presents preliminary results of renewed field research conducted at Caverna delle Arene Candide, with a specific focus on the implications of these new field observations for our understanding of the heretofore underappreciated richness of the funerary ritual of the cave's Epigravettian occupants. The paper begins with a review of the wo...

Cryptotephra are small glass volcanic shards (<80 micron) that occur invisibly in sediments and can be used to create precise isochrons (time datums) in archaeological sites. We identified cryptotephra at Arma Veirana (AV), a Middle and Upper Paleolithic archaeological site approximately 14 km from the Mediterranean coast in Liguria, Italy. The sha...

This summarizes one part of my dissertation, where I combine the results of a stylistic study of Magdalenian portable art to the results of an agent-based model to estimate the temporal and geographical changes in the characteristics of Magdalenian social networks. This poster won 3rd prize at the ISSR poster contest.

This dissertation uses a comparative approach to investigate long-term human- environment interrelationships in times of climate change. It uses Geographical Information Systems and ecological models to reconstruct the Magdalenian (~20,000- 14,000 calibrated years ago) environments of the coastal mountainous zone of Cantabria (Northwest Spain) and...

We present the analysis of 29 human-transported limestone pebbles found during recent excavations (2009–11) in the Final Epigravettian levels at the Caverna delle Arene Candide, Italy. All pebbles are oblong, most bear traces of red ochre and many appear intentionally broken. Macroscopic analyses demonstrate morphological similarity with pebbles us...

This research argues for a refocus of the study of prehistoric social networks that involves contextualizing the inter-site links that are often interpreted as indicators of inter-site social interactions. It focuses on the social networks created during the Lower Magdalenian of the Cantabrian region (Spain), and visible through similarities of por...

The archaeology of death and burial provides a privileged source of insight into the lives of people in the past. This kind of archaeological feature commonly includes the material remains of the dead, containing biological information of age, sex, pathologies, DNA profiles, and isotopic signals of diet and migration. The analysis of burials also p...