The role of river courses in organizing the cultural space of the Upper Paleolithic : examples from the Rhine, Rhône, Danube and Garonne

In order to understand human spatial behavior in the Paleolithic and related processes such as dispersal and mobility, it is urgently imperative to focus on a finer grained analysis of human-environment interactions than usually provided. Recent studies tend to overlook the explanatory value of single natural features establishing important anchor points for Paleolithic hunter-gatherer groups. Rivers are good candidates constituting such important natural features. We thus explore the role of salient rivers in the construction of Upper Paleolithic cultural landscapes through time. It is argued that rivers indeed played a crucial role, either as axes of communication and displacement or as referential frontier features in space. On the other hand, it seems clear that human river engagement was never static, but highly dynamic and variable both through space and time, because it is partly shaped by cultural conceptualizations and embedded in semantic webs. We finish our survey with the observation that in the Early Upper Paleolithic, rivers were mainly used to facilitate the flow of people and information, whereas the spatial consolidation after the colonization of Europe was accompanied by a tendency of conceptualizing rivers as frontiers or even boundaries. Only the Central European Magdalenian is again characterized by the use of rivers as spatial trajectories.