Apesar dos trabalhos acadêmicos serem obras autorais, é sempre bom lembrar que todo trabalho que é feito só é possível devido as inúmeras instituições e pessoas que cercam os pesquisadores. Essa é minha pequena, porém sincera, homenagem as que tornaram esse trabalho possível.No universo de pessoas que me possibilitaram chegar até aqui as primeiras que devem ser agradecidas, sem dúvidas, são meus pais Denival Guilherme Toniato e Neusa Regina Garcia Toniato que ofereceram todo o apoio financeiro e emocional que me permitiram chegar até aqui.Depois deles, a pessoa mais importante foi minha orientadora a Profa. Dra. Marisa Saenz Leme, que pacientemente me orientou em todas as fases deste longo trabalho, e colocou fé na minha capacidade de realizá-lo.
Paleolithic archaeologists often rely on cave and rockshelter sites with rich occupation levels to explore hominin behavior and settlement patterns. However, a closer look into regional occupation data may reveal an uneven distribution of sites and the presence of occupational hiatuses or low-density occupation horizons that often remain understudied. In contrast to this trend, this paper focuses on low-density occupation data to explore regional settlement patterns, using the rich and well-studied Paleolithic record of the Swabian Jura, Germany, as a case study. In this regard, we employ a geoarchaeological approach based on micromorphology to investigate the formation processes of two low-density occupation sites, Schafstall II and Fetzershaldenhöhle, and compare their formation history with the geogenic sequence from Lindenhöhle. We demonstrate that the investigated sites have comparable formation processes, despite their differences in chronology and context. We argue that humans used Schafstall II and Fetzershaldenhöhle for short-term activities, while the sites mostly served as carnivore activity areas, emphasizing the importance of fauna in the accumulation of thick sedimentary sequences. In addition, our findings corroborate the regional climatic record and provide novel insights into the geomorphological history of the less studied Lauchert Valley, where Schafstall II is located. By comparing our results with data from intensively occupied caves in the Swabian Jura, we provide broader implications for the settlement patterns of Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. We conclude with methodological suggestions for investigating sites in hunter-gatherer contexts combining a distributional and a site-specific approach.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.