Dennis Sandgathe

Dennis Sandgathe
Simon Fraser University · Department of Archaeology

PhD

About

74
Publications
43,562
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2,447
Citations
Additional affiliations
January 2010 - present
Simon Fraser University
Position
  • Lecturer

Publications

Publications (74)
Article
Full-text available
The Paleolithic site of La Ferrassie (Dordogne, France) has contributed significantly to the understanding of Middle and Upper Paleolithic technocomplexes, as well as Neanderthal skeletal morphology. Excavations at the site have spanned more than a century and uncovered rich archaeological assemblages associated with the Mousterian, Châtelperronian...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding Palaeolithic hominin subsistence strategies requires the comprehensive taxonomic identification of faunal remains. The high fragmentation of Late Pleistocene faunal assemblages often prevents proper taxonomic identification based on bone morphology. It has been assumed that the morphologically unidentifiable component of the faunal as...
Article
Full-text available
A Third Neanderthal Individual from La Ferrassie • 99 ABSTRACT The Paleolithic site of La Ferrassie (SW France) has been extensively studied since its discovery during the 19th century. In addition to a large sequence including Middle and Upper Paleolithic layers, the site has yielded two very complete adult Neanderthal skeletons, five partial imma...
Article
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The primary focus of this paper is to examine the extent to which the pattern of Neandertal fire use in southwest France occurred at other times and places during the European Late Pleistocene. In previous studies, both direct and indirect data showed a pattern of limited fire use in layers associated with colder intervals in MIS 4 and 3 and more f...
Chapter
The ability to make and use fire can be considered as a behavioural threshold in human evolution. The aim of this chapter is to present an overview of the research on fire among Neanderthals. We compiled and reviewed the archaeological evidence and scientific studies on the topic, including different methodological approaches, theoretical considera...
Article
Full-text available
Exploring the role of changing climates in human evolution is currently impeded by a scarcity of climatic information at the same temporal scale as the human behaviors documented in archaeological sites. This is mainly caused by high uncertainties in the chronometric dates used to correlate long-term climatic records with archaeological deposits. O...
Article
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The stone artifact record has been one of the major grounds for investigating our evolution. With the predominant focus on their morphological attributes and technological aspects of manufacture, stone artifacts and their assemblages have been analyzed as explicit measures of past behaviors, adaptations, and population histories. This analytical fo...
Article
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The original version of this article unfortunately contained mistake in the presentation of the author’s name.
Article
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The ability to control fire clearly had a significant impact on human evolution, but when and how hominins developed this ability remains poorly understood. Improving our understanding of the history of hominin fire use will require not only additional fieldwork but also comparative analyses of fire use by ethnographically-documented hunter-gathere...
Article
Full-text available
The grand abri at La Ferrassie (France) has been a key site for Palaeolithic research since the early part of the 20th century. It became the eponymous site for one variant of Middle Palaeolithic stone tools, and its sequence was used to define stages of the Aurignacian, an early phase of the Upper Palaeolithic. Several Neanderthal remains, includi...
Article
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Mortuary behavior (activities concerning dead conspecifics) is one of many traits that were previously widely considered to have been uniquely human, but on which perspectives have changed markedly in recent years. Theoretical approaches to hominin mortuary activity and its evolution have undergone major revision, and advances in diverse archeologi...
Article
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The use of space, both at the landscape and the site level, is considered an important aspect of hominin adaptations that changed through time. At the site level, spatial analyses are typically conducted on deposits thought to have a high degree of temporal resolution. Sites with highly time-averaged deposits are viewed as inferior for these analys...
Article
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The plant component of Neanderthal subsistence and technology is not well documented, partially due to the preservation constraints of macrobotanical components. Phytoliths, however, are preserved even when other plant remains have decayed and so provide evidence for Neanderthal plant use and the environmental context of archaeological sites. Phyto...
Chapter
Prior to excavating Pech IV, we studied Bordes’ collection from his 8 years of excavation at the site.
Chapter
The Middle Paleolithic site of Pech de l’Azé IV (Pech IV) is one of the cluster of four Lower and Middle Paleolithic sites located in the Perigord region of southwest France.
Chapter
From the outset of the Pech IV project, geoarchaeology played an integral role in the excavations.
Article
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Archaeologist who transformed our understanding of Neanderthals.
Article
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Initially excavated in the early twentieth century, La Ferrassie is one of the most important sites for the Middle Paleolithic of Western Europe. Aside from the numerous Neanderthal remains found there, the stone artifacts recovered from the site are featured prominently in discussion and debates of Mousterian variability. Recent renewed excavation...
Article
Full-text available
Significant variability has been observed in the frequency of fire use over the course of the Late Pleistocene at several Middle Paleolithic sites in southwest France. In particular, Neandertals appear to have used fire more frequently during warm climatic periods and very infrequently during cold periods. After reviewing several lines of evidence...
Book
This book provides comprehensive information on the materials excavated at Pech de l’Azé IV, both by the original excavator François Bordes in the 1970s, and more recently by the authors and their scientific team. Applying a range of new excavation and analytical techniques, it presents detailed material on the formation of the site, its chronology...
Article
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While lithic objects can potentially inform us about past adaptations and behaviors, it is important to develop a comprehensive understanding of all of the various processes that influence what we recover from the archaeological record. We argue here that many assumptions used by archaeologists to derive behavioral inferences through the definition...
Article
Full-text available
Employing fire as an adaptive aid represents one of the most important technological developments in the course of hominin evolution, and, not surprisingly, research into the prehistoric use of fire has a long history. Over the last decade or so there has been a notable increase in research. Some people have continued to focus on better understandi...
Article
Full-text available
Analyses of archaeological material recovered from several Middle Paleolithic sites in southwest France have provided strong corroborating data on Neanderthal use of fire. Both direct and indirect data show that Neanderthals in this region were frequently and/or intensively using fire during warmer periods, but such evidence declines significantly...
Article
Full-text available
Although research relating to Paleolithic fire use has a long history, it has seen a particular resurgence in the last decade. This has been fueled in part by improved analytical techniques, improved standards of data collection and reporting, and the discovery of new sites with important fire residues in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. A majo...
Chapter
The chronological positions of the technological and typological variants of the Mousterian in southwest France have been the subject of debate for over fifty years. While some relative stratigraphical sequences provide a (regional) pattern, which could be interpreted at least in parts as chronological succession, chronometric dating appears to fal...
Poster
Full-text available
The site of La Ferrassie (Dordogne, France) is well known for the presence of several (N=7) Neandertal individuals, and here we focus on two adults (LF1 and LF2) discovered by Peyrony and Capitan in the early 20thc [1], and LF8, a child excavated by Delporte in the 1970s [2]. In spite when the LF1 and LF2 discoveries were made, we know that they we...
Poster
Full-text available
The first evidence of the partial infant Neandertal skeleton La Ferrassie 8 (LF 8) (Grand Abri of La Ferrassie, Dordogne, France) was discovered in 1970, although most of the remains were found in 1973 as part of the 1968–1973 work at the site by H. Delporte. This individual and the other Neandertal children from La Ferrassie were published in the...
Article
In this paper we report a study designed to shed light on the possibility that clothing differences played a role in the replacement of the Neanderthals by early modern humans. There is general agreement that early modern humans in Europe utilized specialized cold weather clothing, but the nature of the clothing used by Neanderthals is debated. Som...
Article
Neandertals disappeared from Europe just after 40,000 years ago. Some hypotheses ascribe this to numerous population crashes associated with glacial cycles in the late Pleistocene. The goal of this paper is to test the hypothesis that glacial periods stressed Neandertal populations. If cold climates stressed Neandertals, their subsistence behaviors...
Article
Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) measurements were made on individual, sand-sized grains of quartz from Middle Palaeolithic deposits at three sites (Pech de l'Azé I, II and IV) located close to one another in the Dordogne region of southwest France. We were able to calculate OSL ages for 69 samples collected from these three sites. These age...
Article
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Located in southwest France, Roc de Marsal is a cave with a rich Mousterian stratigraphic sequence. The lower part of the sequence (Layers 9–5) are characterized by assemblages dominated by Levallois lithic technology associated with composite faunal spectra (including red deer, roe deer and reindeer) that shows a gradual increase in the frequency...
Article
Recent excavations at the cave site of Roc de Marsal (in the Dordogne region of SW France) have yielded several Mousterian assemblages rich in well-preserved faunal remains. The Layer 4 faunal assemblage, associated with a rich Quina Mousterian occupation, provides an opportunity to investigate Neandertal prey selection, transport decisions and rei...
Article
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Using ethnographic parallels the authors identify 'bark peelers' used in Ice Age Europe. They suggest that Palaeolithic Europeans used these to extract edible and nourishing new growth from the trunks of spring trees.
Poster
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Phytolith analysis can be used to investigate the relationship between hominins, plants, and environmental change. It has proven useful in understanding specific hominin behaviors (e.g., use of fire and fuel composition), and diachronic changes in plant species for paleoenvironmental reconstructions. The integration of phytolith analysis with soil...
Article
A new interdisciplinary project was initiated to excavate a portion of the Palaeolithic site of La Ferrassie left intact by earlier excavations. One of the aims of this project was to provide chronological information on the succession of Middle and Upper Palaeolithic layers, as well as on the skeletons unearthed by Capitan and Peyrony in the early...
Data
Full-text available
The question of intentional Neanderthal interment continues to be debated in paleoanthropology. Among the criteria that can be used to investigate the intentionality of a burial, many of them rely on geoarchaeological data that speak to the context of the human remains. In this paper, we revisit the original attribution of the Roc de Marsal Neander...
Article
The relative and numerical chronological position of the technological and typological variants of the Mousterian in southwest France has been the subject of debate for over fifty years. Since the advent of both ESR and TL dating methods in the 1980s, a database of chronometric dates for a growing number of sites has been steadily accumulating. A r...
Article
This paper reports a series of radiocarbon dates on bone samples coming from the Mousterian of Acheulian Tradition (MTA) Layer 3 at the top of the Pech de l'Azé IV (Pech IV, France) Middle Palaeolithic sequence. All of these samples showed evidence of human impact, and they were prepared using current pre-treatment techniques to remove or identify...
Article
Pyrotechnology must be seen as one of the most important technological developments in human prehistory. Once developed it eventually came to serve a wide range of applications, but when this actually occurred is not well understood. Fire is well known at a number of Middle Palaeolithic sites in Western Europe, and the Neandertals of this region cl...
Article
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New excavations at Contrebandiers Cave, Morocco, began in 2007 and continued through 2010. This site, originally excavated by Roche in the 1950s, contained deposits with Aterian, Iberomaurusian, and Neolithic materials, although the latter were completely removed during Roche's excavations. This report presents an overview of the recent excavations...
Chapter
Full-text available
TURQ A., DIBBLE H, GOLDBERG P., McPHERRON S., SANDGATHE D., MERCIER D., BRUXELLES L., LAVILLE D. et MADELAINE S. – 2012. - In : , p. 78-87.
Article
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Using a number of Middle and Late Pleistocene sites with good evidence for fire, Roebroeks and Villa (1) argued that the habitual use of fire did not become part of hominin technological repertoires until the latter half of the Middle Pleistocene. We are pleased to see other researchers taking a more critical view of the nature and quality of the a...
Article
Whether Neandertals buried their dead has considerable bearing on the debate concerning the nature of their cultural behavior. Among the claims for intentional Neandertal burial in Europe, the child from Roc de Marsal has long been one of the less contentious examples because its articulated skeleton was found in what has become widely accepted as...
Article
The site of Combe-Grenal is arguably the reference site for the Mousterian of southwest France. Bordes excavated the site over a period of 13 years and generated a large collection of lithics and fauna from a deep series of 64 Lower and Middle Paleolithic levels. Though Bordes only partially published his work at the site, its long stratigraphic se...
Poster
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New excavations at the Middle Paleolithic site of Roc de Marsal (France)
Article
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Le gisement mousterien du Pech de l’Aze IV se situe a Carsac (Dordogne) en Perigord, pres de Sarlat, dans le sud-ouest de la France. Fouille par F. Bordes durant les annees 1970, il n’a jamais ete veritablement publie si l’on excepte l’etude que nous avons consacree en 2000 au materiel issu de ses fouilles. Les travaux de terrain effectues dans ce...
Article
A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Dept. of Anthropology. Thesis (M.A.)--University of Alberta, 1998.

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