Hunters, gatherers and the constantly changing environment

Archaeologists are analyzing stone tools from a site in Lower Austria with the aim of understanding the strategies that Paleolithic hunter-gatherer communities employed to deal with changes in the climate.
Culture and Society
July 22, 2024
Team of archaeologists at the site in the Danube region
The project team on location at the Kammern-Grubgraben site in the Danube region. Climate change led to the migration of hunter-gatherers, who passed through Europe here during the coldest phase of the last ice age 20,000 to 25,000 years ago. © ÖAI, ÖAW

Hadersdorf-Kammern in Lower Austria, 15 minutes’ drive from Krems, harbors an important site for Stone Age enthusiasts and experts: the Kammern-Grubgraben site. “There are a lot of sites around Krems that relate to the Stone Age,” explains archaeologist Thomas Einwögerer, who is in charge of the local excavations and heads the Quaternary Archaeology research group at the Austrian Archaeological Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Norbert Buchinger, a doctoral student of archaeology adds: “The sites in the Danube region are among the most important in Europe for the Upper Paleolithic, or the Gravettian, to be more precise.”

Gravettian is the name of an archaeological culture of the Upper Paleolithic, which began around 33,000 years ago. The Kammern-Grubgraben site contains artifacts from its most recent phase, particularly from the Epi-Gravettian, which followed the Gravettian in Central and Eastern Europe 25,000 years ago and ended 14,000 years ago. The “Last Glacial Maximum” (from 25,000 to 20,000 years ago), the period during which the ice sheets were at their greatest extent, falls within this Epi-Gravettian.

In the context of the “Success, limits and failure of subsistence strategies“, which is funded by the FWF, Einwögerer and Buchinger are analyzing finds from Kammern-Grubgraben jointly with colleagues from Germany. The researchers are comparing these finds with artifacts from other Gravettian and Epigravettian sites, including those in Krems-Wachtberg, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary.

The project

How did hunter-gatherers cope with climate changes? How did they survive and what was their diet like?” An international team led by archaeologist Thomas Einwögerer is addressing these questions. 

Success, limits and failure of subsistence strategies (2020–2024) has been awarded EUR 122,482 in funding from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).

The times they were a-changing – but why?

“We want to know how hunter-gatherers coped with the environment – and with the fact that it was changing. How did they survive and what was their diet like?” notes Einwögerer. The research team wants to solve part of a puzzle: why did ruptures in the so-called material culture occur towards the end of the Gravettian?

Material culture includes all man-made objects or artifacts that archaeologists find. The experts use these artifacts to find out what the life of the communities at that time was like. This includes issues such as whether, what and how they hunted, used tools, buried their dead or dressed themselves. “The Gravettian extended from the Atlantic to the Urals. Across this entire area, the finds provide a very homogeneous picture of how hunter-gatherer communities lived,” explains Norbert Buchinger. From Portugal to Russia, similar burial rites were used and the populations used similar hunting weapons, such as the Gravette point.

In contrast, the Epigravettian reveals local differences. The researchers identify these differences by means of the type of stone tools used, for instance. “To give an example: in the Epigravettian there are no hunting weapons comparable to the Gravette point,” explains Buchinger. The cause of these discrepancies is not yet fully understood, inter alia because there are not more than a handful of dated sites, especially before the Last Glacial Maximum.

Archaeologist and archaeologist take samples from a deep trench at a site.
Kammern-Grubgraben 2020, sampling in section 3 by the project partners Christoph Mayr and Lillian Reiss. © ÖAI/ÖAW

Unstable climate, unstable systems

One possible reason is that ecological conditions deteriorated at the end of the Gravitian period, up to the beginning of the Last Glacial Maximum (a period that began 29,000 years ago and ended 25,000 years ago). The climate in Europe became increasingly unstable and colder. “The more unstable the climate, the more unstable human systems become,” notes Thomas Einwögerer.

It is possible that these fluctuations caused cultural systems to collapse. The concomitant changes in flora and fauna also changed how and what people hunted or where they camped. Perhaps this also led to a population decline in the region. In order to confirm this hypothesis, the research team analyzed finds from Kammern-Grubgraben. Archaeozoologist Kerstin Pasda analyzes bones, antlers and teeth to identify which animals were hunted in which season. Andreas Maier explores settlement patterns, also in order to understand social structures. Geoscientist Christoph Maier examines soil stratification in order to draw conclusions about the climate.

Lessons learned from stones

Stones and stone tools also furnish important information about the period in the Paleolithic that gave the Stone Age its name. “The lion’s share of the tools that people used to cut, scrape, plane or carve were made of stone,” says Norbert Buchinger.

Stone tools tell us how people lived in the Epigravettian. At certain intervals they moved around and spent short periods camping on a site. At that time, Kammern-Grubgraben was probably the main camp site. The stone tools that were used at the site were preserved in the loess soil for thousands of years. This represents a stroke of luck for archaeologists. In the context of the project and his doctoral thesis, Norbert Buchinger is analyzing no less than roughly 20,000 stone tools that were unearthed during excavations in Kammern-Grubgraben in the 1980s and 1990s.

Gaps in the jigsaw puzzle

The documentation from these past excavations tells him where the artifacts were found. Using radiocarbon dating (C-14 method), the researchers determine the age of the soil layers in which the stone tools were found, which helps them draw conclusions about the age of the tools.

“The investigations of the stone tools provide unique insights into the life of hunter-gatherer communities. For instance we determine whether a tool was produced on site or only ended up there,” explains the archaeologist. These analyses also help the research team to understand migration patterns.

Nonetheless, there are still many uncertainties, as Einwögerer describes: “We are putting together something like a jigsaw puzzle of which we have neither all the pieces nor a picture of the final image. Every analysis and every evaluation gives us another piece of the puzzle.” Rough outlines of the big picture are already emerging. The researchers were able, for instance, to show that the hunter-gatherer communities in Kammern-Grubgraben primarily hunted reindeer. The analysis of large stone pavements also provided an important clue. The hunter-gatherers used them to dry the skins of their prey. The stone base made it possible to process the skins even when the upper layer of the permafrost melted in summer.

The Stone Age refrigerator

In summer 2019, archaeologists from Thomas Einwögerer's group found another big jigsaw piece. “We were able to unearth a meat cache – a kind of Ice Age refrigerator. It consists of a stone pavement on the permafrost soil that was surrounded by stones. In this pile of stones people stored reindeer meat,” explains Einwögerer. In the meat cache, the meat was kept safe from smaller predators for several weeks.

As yet, there has not been enough research to explain how the breakdown in the material culture in the Epi-Graviette came about. “The picture is still very fuzzy,” says Norbert Buchinger. But one thing is certain: the researchers will continue to put the story together piece by piece.

Personal details

Norbert Buchinger studied prehistory and historical archaeology at the University of Vienna, and prehistory and early history at the University of Cologne. The archaeologist is conducting research in the Quaternary Archaeology research group at the Austrian Archaeological Institute (ÖAI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). Buchinger works on technological and typological analyses of stone artifacts from European and Arab sites.

Thomas Einwögerer studied prehistory and early history at the University of Vienna. In 2000 he became a research associate at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Einwögerer has headed the Quaternary Archaeology research group at the Austrian Archaeological Institute of the ÖAW since 2017.

Publications

Reiss L., Mayr Ch., Pasda K., Einwögerer, T. et al.: Changing food webs before and during the Last Glacial Maximum based on stable isotopes of animal bone collagen from Lower Austria, in: Journal of Quaternary Science 2023

Einwögerer, T.: The Discovery of a Possible 'Meat Cache'. Recent Excavations at the Upper Palaeolithic Open-air Site in Kammern-Grubgraben 2015-2020, in: Archaeologia Austriaca 2021

Händel M., Simon U., Maier A. et al.: Kammern-Grubgraben revisited - First results from renewed investigations at a well-known LGM site in eastern Austria, in: Quaternary International 2021