Objectives: To couple the taxonomic and spatial information collected in WPI/II with the climatic model of WPIII in order to search for causal relations between environmental and topographic factors and distributional and material culture changes seen in the archaeological record.

Methods: In ecology, ‘palaeo-Species Distribution Models’ (pSDM) are used to investigate which climatic and topographic factors, in isolation or in suites, have the greatest influence in the distribution of a given taxon. WP IV will adapt this methodology to ‘palaeo-Cultural Distribution Models’ (pCDM), where the cultural taxonomic units of WP I/II replace their biological counterparts, but where the aim also is to quantitatively and in a spatially explicit fashion link environmental factors to the occurrence of different archaeological units. Distribution models require two kinds of input data: i) presence/absence of sites of the taxonomic units in question, ii) climatic model output, and iii) topographic information. Drawing on the datasets produced by previous WPs, WP IV will build pCDMs in the recently developed Open Source R-based analytical environment WALLACE designed with reproducibility in mind. A wide variety of algorithms are available for these kinds of analyses and sensitivity analyses will be conducted in WALLACE. As previously demonstrated, this approach can provide considerable insights into which palaeoenvironmental (= palaeoclimate + topography) factors (e.g. average temperature of the coldest and warmest months respectively, topographic diversity, slope, number of frost days, effective temperature, precipitation, etc.), combinations thereof and their temporal dynamics (i.e. the pace of change in the selected parameters) shaped the presence and absence – in other words, the niche – of Palaeolithic foragers. These models allow a ranking of pertinent environmental factors defining a given cultural taxonomic unit’s niche and hence can be used to infer their adaptations. The approach has never before been applied to the Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic, and never with taxonomic units specifically constructed with this application mind.

Expected outcomes: Major new insights – statistically evaluated and fully reproducible – on which palaeoenvironmental factors or combinations thereof impacted forager communities during the Late Pleistocene, and whether specific cultural taxonomic units in fact can be said to represent adaptations to specific environmental factors.