In order to track diachronic changes in archaeological sequences, researchers typically partition time into stratigraphic layers defined during fieldwork, which serve as the framework for ensuing analyses. These analytical units have a significant impact on archaeological inference, defining its resolution, and influencing both the study of cultural assemblages and the reconstruction of past environments. However, field layers are seldom re-evaluated after excavation despite the fact that archaeological deposits are now commonly recognised as often containing material ‘mixed’ together by site formation processes, excavation techniques or analytical practices. Although the analysis of intra-site spatial data clearly offers a means to overcome these issues, our literature review of 192 journal articles revealed the potential of this data (notably vertical projections of piece-plotted artefacts) to be under-exploited in Prehistoric archaeology. Here we advocate for the development of a more spatially-informed framework for interpretation that we refer to as Post-Excavation Stratigraphies or PES. After proposing a definition for “PES”, we attempt to develop a framework for theoretical considerations underlying their implication, importance, and potential. Three main benefits of PES are highlighted: ensuring assemblage reliability, increased chronological and spatial resolution, and more reliable interpretations based on a multi-stratigraphic approach. We contend that the stratigraphy defined during fieldwork is insufficient and potentially misleading. By providing a different “stratigraphic view” of the same sequence, each specialist can contribute data that, when combined, produces a better understanding of interactions between changes in, for example, technological or cultural traditions, subsistence strategies, or paleoenvironments.
The study of fossil bone assemblages has brought up evidence of the existence in the Pleistocene of faunal communities with no modern analogues. This is notably the case for Palaeolithic archaeological sites that have yielded, in the same stratigraphic layers, remains of species that are rarely sympatric in present-day ecosystems. The Mousterian – layer C – and Châtelperronian – layer B – of Grotte XVI (Dordogne, France) provide examples of such “composite” faunas: high proportions of Red deer (21 % and 34 % of the total number of identifiable remains of ungulates, respectively), Roe deer (17 % and 14 %) and Reindeer (42 % and 26 %) have been described in the same assemblages. In order to better interpret these no-analog communities, large mammal remains from layers B and C of Grotte XVI are reanalysed here. Taxonomic identifications, taphonomic data (cortical surface states, anthropic marks, evidences of carnivore activity, etc.), season-of-death estimates and bone refits (intra- and inter-layers) are combined and analysed as part of a three-dimensional spatial study of the faunal assemblages.
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