ridges, the refugees fashioned circular huts by clearing the stony surface, making a dome of spiny ocotillo stalks—some still rooted and merely bent over and tied—tented with canvas and blankets.
FIGURE 5. Geronimo’s Camp, 1886. Library of Congress.
Obviously, this Apache band was under extraordinary stress, and it would be tempting to see these impermanent huts as the scant shelters of desperate peoples. Yet, as Seymour points out, the archaeological traces of the last camp at Cañon de los Embudos are similar to those found at other Apache sites: circular constructions of fieldstones, “sleeping circles” brushed clear of rocks, and similarly slight modifications of landscape. And while the reason for Geronimo’s mobility (trying to evade impending attack by two different armies) was different, the response was similar to other hunters and gatherers who must frequently move: find a place that meets your needs, use the area, and move on.
Hunters and gatherers approach landscape in varying ways. Food-collecting societies may become more sedentary for different reasons. Some groups are seasonally tethered by the availability of fresh water, plant foods, or other critical resources. Other societies may be constrained by the presence of competing human societies. But one common pattern, as Binford has observed, is that hunters and gatherers tend to become less mobile the further they live from the Equator.
This seems to result from two central facts: 1) there are greater seasonal changes in ambient temperatures the further one moves from the Equator, and 2) the principal advantage of a dwelling is the regulation of heat loss. For example, a detailed analysis of the temperatures created in simple dwellings—replicas of windbreaks, shade structures, and simple huts—found that the real advantages of buildings are marked in colder climates: a domed hut with a warming fire is a better means for controlling temperatures than a sunshade in a hot environment.16 While this seems a fairly obvious conclusion, it suggests that one would expect people to build more substantial dwellings as they moved into more rigorous environments.
That is precisely what occurred in the Upper Paleolithic (at about 45,000 to 13,000 years ago) in Europe during the Last Glacial Maximum. As modern humans migrated from Africa into Eurasia and beyond, they adapted to new and often challenging environments using a variety of technologies—including shelters. Sometime between 37,000 and 34,000 years ago, humans had migrated almost to the Arctic Circle.17 Continental glaciers reached their maximum extents between 33,000 and 26,500 years ago, a period of peak cold.18 As expanding glaciers in western Europe drove people south to the Iberian Peninsula, the vast plains of eastern Europe remained occupied despite its severe climate.19 At this time, temperatures of central and eastern Europe were roughly equivalent to northern and central Siberia today, with cool summers (10°C–11°C/50°F–52°F) and achingly frigid winters (−19°C–−27°C/−2.2°F–−17°F). In eastern Europe a vast expanse of tundra and permafrost steppe fronted the glacial sheet, forming a band of cold grasslands 200–300 kilometers wide. With winter temperatures that plunged below −30°C–−40°C, these periglacial steppes were severe landscapes that nonetheless supported dense herds of mammoths, bison, horses, and reindeer—big game that tempted hunters out onto the icy plains.
To survive in this environment, shelters were as essential as spear-points and flake tools. Huts and tents extended the hunters’ range beyond the limits of rock shelters and caves. As early as 30,000 years ago, structures 5–6 meters in diameter with indoor hearths were erected at sites in western Ukraine and Slovakia. By 25,000 years ago, at the Russian site of Gagarino on the Don River, hunters built circular, semi-subterranean winter homes by excavating shallow house pits 4–6 meters across and raising hide-covered tents. The people of Gagarino warmed themselves by hearths that burned bone on a treeless steppe.20
Bone was used for more than fuel. At a dozen sites in the Dnepr and Desna river basins of Ukraine and Russia, people built their homes from mammoth bones.21
The mammoth-bone huts generally date to 15,000–14,000 years ago, after the Last Glacial Maximum but still sufficiently frigid to create a cold tundra-steppe environment. The sites were located on promontories and terraces, providing a commanding view of the game herds that moved in the river bottoms and ravines.
At Mezhrich (Mejiriche) four mammoth-bone houses were found. The houses are circular or oval, 3–6 meters in diameter, and enclosing a living area of 12–24 square meters. The curving Vs of mammoth mandibles were stacked along the base of the huts’ walls; in one building 95 mammoth mandibles were incorporated into the base of the wall, 40 tusks may have served as roof supports, and a staggering 20,584 kilograms of mammoth bone was used for the dwelling. So much mammoth bone was required, it was necessary to stockpile bone and scavenge natural kill sites. It would have required ten men working four days just to build this house.
Outside, storage pits dug down to the permafrost kept meat cold. Besides mammoth meat, the tundra hunters ate a wide variety of game: ptarmigans and geese, horse, boar, musk ox, and hare. They also hunted for furs, killing ermine, fox, and wolverine.
Deep hearths warmed the inside of the houses and the houses held a wide array of artifacts. Chipped stone blades, scrapers, and burins. Worked bone needles, awls, and shaft straighteners. And there were decorative objects: pieces of amber from sources 100 kilometers away, necklaces and bracelets made from beads of fossilized marine shells from 300 kilometers away.
The massive mammoth-bone houses are amazing dwellings, although not the only places lived in by their occupants. As the archaeologist Olga Soffer points out, the mammoth dwellings represent a single, although essential, element in a larger hunting and gathering strategy. While the mammoth-bone dwelling encampments had evidence for a wide array of activities, other camps reflected a narrower range of pursuits. There were warm-season hunting camps, where dwellings were tents or other lightweight shelters. Sites with storage pits but with no evidence for dwellings were places where game was butchered and cached in the permafrost. Other sites were lithic workshops where stone was quarried and worked, but with little evidence for hunting and no structures. Some of these sites were occupied only once, while the sites with mammoth-bone dwellings were lived in again and again. But all the sites—whether with solid mammoth-bone houses or hide tents—included shelter as the essential tool of the human adaptation.
. . .
The archaeology of ancient hunters and gatherers illuminates the significance of home. The creation of dwellings was a central innovation that allowed humans to occupy the diverse environments of earth, extending humanity’s reach much as the portaledge allows climbers to scale otherwise unattainable peaks. Although our nonhuman primate relatives make nests—and as discussed in chapter 2, chimpanzees actually modify their nests in light of local conditions—only humans create a diverse array of dwellings. Paleolithic dwellings were vital for expansion into higher latitudes, especially during glacial periods. Dwellings allowed humans to range further, exploiting regions and resources inaccessible from rare and stationary rock shelters and caves.
And yet the creation of houses involved more than shelter. Mobile hunters and gatherers used dwellings to map onto landscape, incorporating new regions into the broad spaces that were part of their home ranges. Across that landscape mobile hunters and gatherers made camp. Those encampments varied in duration and placement as people lingered over abundant stocks of food, fled enemies, or buried their dead. For at least 25,000 years, humans have made substantial shelters as elements of a larger cultural strategy. Often, as in the case of Mezhrich, the dwellings became a place of return. When that occurred—and it did so at different places at different times for different reasons—new sets of connections were created between culture and shelter, connections that only intensified and changed as humans became more sedentary.
The archaeology
