World Archaeology

Stone Age Places

Landscapes in evolutionary studies generally focus on large-scale environmental and climatic change, or on reconstructing site-specific environments. Recent methodological advances, alongside improved chronologies, have encouraged correlation of environmental and behavioural change. Landscape is frequently a driver or container for cognition, adaptation, and physiology, while local-scale analyses often incorporate conceptual tools from landscape archaeology (mobility systems, taskscapes, niche construction) via raw-material and chaîne opératoire analyses but lack explicit interpretive frameworks.

By contrast, archaeological research on younger periods routinely engages with perception, experience, materiality, place-making, and agency, sometimes extending these ideas to nonhuman or more-than-human entities. Why are these perspectives largely absent in deep-time contexts? Even though Stone Age archaeology constantly deals with nonhuman organisms, (most hominins, animals, plants) research remains shaped by models centred on lithic technology, dispersals, and cognition. Hominin perception, experience, “sense of place,” synanthropy, and other experiential dimensions remain largely unaddressed. The hierarchy of “big questions” (including innovation, symbolism, and migration dynamics) relegate ecological information to a supporting role.

Are hominin instances of subjective, conscious experience considered inaccessible due to assumptions about cognitive limits? Are lingering progressivist narratives inadvertently affecting ideas about who can possess a “sense of place”? Does persistent nature–culture dualism obscure the deep entanglement of hominins, materials, organisms, and landscapes? Are methodological constraints or fear of reduced scientific credibility inhibiting theoretical experimentation?

Contributors to this volume are invited to reconsider the divide between ecological space and experiential place and to explore more dynamic, relational, and synanthropic understandings of early landscapes. Which approaches could move evolutionary archaeology beyond mapping adaptation toward understanding how hominins inhabited, perceived, and co-created their worlds? We encourage papers offering novel approaches to Stone Age landscapes, and papers critiquing the relevance of such theory to Stone Age sites. Research from any location grounded in fieldwork, modelling, or theory are welcome.