Objectives: To thoroughly and critically review the history and practice of constructing analytical units – cultures, groups, industries, facies – in the Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic of Europe, and to articulate this with the relevant literature on taxonomy in the philosophy of biology.

Methods: This WP will address the overlapping effects of paradigmatic and regional biases in Final Palaeolithic and earliest Mesolithic research by first mapping the landscape of proposed cultures for this period, their suggested chronological ranges and spatial extents, on the basis of the published literature. Qualitative as well as bibliometric network methods will be employed to dissect the interaction patterns of involved scholars and their output over time. Alongside, WP I will also provide a first ever exhaustive, inter-regional tabulation of which characteristics are used to define the various cultures, industries, groups or facies, and which locales serve as anchoring loci classici. These cultural taxonomic units will then be examined research-historically: Who proposed them and when, what was the geo-political context of the time, in what language were key texts published, and how were they consumed by subsequent research. In a second step, WP I will articulate these data with theoretical considerations of unit epistemology and taxonomy in palaeobiology, a discipline that faces many of the same challenges – a stratigraphically deposited but highly fragmented record of past individuals and populations – when it comes to defining its analytical units. Palaeobiology has, however, embraced quantitative approaches at a much earlier stage with significant ramifications for how operational units are now constructed.

Expected outcomes: A comprehensive, critical and fully geo-referenced mapping – metaphorically as well as literally – of Final Palaeolithic and earliest Mesolithic cultural variability as seen through the lens of traditional typology. Based on this mapping, a critical discussion of the history and current status of Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic taxonomies and of cultural taxonomic approaches in archaeology in general will be provided. WP I will also produce a comprehensive trait list of key diagnostics linked to these cultural units (type artefacts, type frequencies, retouch frequencies, raw materials), a list of key sites as well as guidelines for evaluating the epistemic validity of the previously charted cultural units, and how to construct alternatives.