 Good afternoon. I'm going to give probably quite a different, quite a different perspective on the European experience than what we just heard from Julian. I should probably give a little bit of personal history before I start because I did all my, I did all my third-level education in the UK but the majority of work that I've done is actually in Eastern Europe and in the last two and a half years I've been based in France so I can't really claim to belong to any particular school and what I want to present to you today is not actually particularly data heavy but it's to do with a particular theoretical approach and a particular methodology within that approach and what I want to talk to you about is typology which I realise sometimes people say mean things like it's you know it really does have a bad name in the city of the Paleolithic and I can understand why that is because there has been a lot of really bad typology done in the Paleolithic. I have absolutely no disagreement with that perspective and I think where it is acknowledged as having some value it's often just seen as a precursor to applying other approaches but for me personally it has a lot of value as a principal research approach as a principal methodology and I'm hoping in this in this presentation to explain why I believe that. Typology is the study of types. Typology is not anything more or less than that. It's not a it's not a prescriptive way of looking at the archaeological record it's just a concentration on types of when we're talking about lithic typology it's the study of lithic tool types generally speaking and they can tell us an awful lot. I don't think that lithic types are worth studying for their own sake they're only worth studying because we have certain research questions that they can help us to answer and the research question that I'm most interested in in my own work is to do with how we build and rebuild revise and criticise our chronic cultural framework so the cultural taxonomy that we use in the apocalyptic that the units that we use to describe and analyse the archaeological record and this is a really important task I think for archaeologists it's a really interesting thing to study and lithic typology gives us a really useful way to do quite a lot of this work. Some people talk about technotipology this is a word that as far as I know comes directly from the french uh technotipology and I suppose the increasing use of that word of that word is to emphasise the incorporation of technological information into our typological definitions and descriptions. Me personally I'm just going to talk about typology in this talk because you know to me it's to me it's the same thing to me typology is always incorporated technological information so I don't really think there's a very strong distinction to be made there. The theoretical underpinnings that I use in my work are as follows number one all assemblages are similar number two all assemblages are different and I'm not just trying to be funny here I think I think it's it's kind of important because if you compare any two assemblages from the apocalyptic you can find similarities between and you can also find differences and that's important because if you're interested in looking at similarities and differences within the archaeological record and to try and find some structure in that record so I try and find some patterning in that record you need to have a little bit of context for what these similarities and differences mean and for me if you're studying the european apocalyptic and mesolithic you need to consider the entire the entirety of that record as your context and so if you're looking for meaningful similarities if you're looking for the similarities that actually tell you something about cultural similarities in the past there are two criteria that they that those similarities need to fulfil first of all they should be restricted in space and time and secondly they should be coherent and space and time and what I mean by that is that certain types we know occur over and over again in the apocalyptic record if you just take for example burans as a general category they the the presence or absence of of burans does not tell you very much about how similar two assemblages are in the apocalyptic so what we are really interested in that is the features that are restricted and so this this goes straight away to the study of types we're looking for types that are restricted in the archaeological record so for example vector pfk book appearance on the other hand are restricted their their shared presence in numerous sites you know probably tells us something about salience similarities between those sites but we're also interested in geographically and temporally coherent features and the reason for that is that we are looking for similarities that are the process the product of social processes the product of cultural transmission between groups either through time or through space so what we want is groups of us groups of assemblages that share a certain feature if you find the same feature in two groups of sites with three groups of sites that are very distant either in time or in space we're probably looking at the product of convergence now all of that I think is pretty I think it's pretty safe I think that's all pretty well accepted I hope what I've said but this then this then is the I suppose the background that I'm using to come back to lithic typology so for me there are three stages to doing lithic typology to studying these types in the archaeological record first of all you want to identify the types that fulfill those criteria that I just talked about then you want to try and work out a definition of those types that is clear and I mean extremely clear but also minimal so that it does enough work to define that type to do the work that you wanted to do to find similarities in the archaeological record and no more and then third you want to describe those types you want to consider the variation that you find within them and obviously there's a little bit of back and forth that you can get between definition and description because as you find more as you find more lithics that conform to your definition you might find that the variation is not quite as originally seemed you can go back to it now the definitions of types can include morphological dimensional and technological information so that's the information about the lithics themselves but they can also include temporal and geographical information so what I mean by that is that this is to get around that problem of convergence that I talked about before so if you have two groups of lithics that you think are not actually connected culturally but which in fact can be described using exactly the same definition you want to include temporal and geographical information in order to separate them in the archaeological record why lithic typology because it facilitates large scale comparisons so I work in central and eastern Europe mainly and there's an awful lot of work to be done out there in terms of getting our heads around the taxonomy of the sites the taxonomy of the assemblages um and if I were to go around and try and apply a detailed technological analysis to every single one of those sites I would never finish my PhD so this is I think the real power of lithic typology that you can you can start to get a first approximation of this chronocultural framework very quickly I'm also going to assert that there is no a priori reason why it should be less informative than purely technological approaches there are a few other aspects of the type of archaeology that I've mainly worked on that are particularly relevant to why I think typology has been the most appropriate method to use so first of all it allows for work in old collections where often the debitage is nowhere to be seen if it was ever properly excavated and recorded in the first place and also because in many of the regions where I work there are very strong differences in raw material availability that really stymies technological approaches so if you have one site where people are using river cobbles to nap and you have another site you know 50 kilometers away where people are using beautiful nodules of flints to nap it's very difficult to do a fair typological or fair technological comparison of them but typological approaches can still help you to see some of the similarities that are there now I want to give two examples of why of how I think this typological approach helps to build a chronic cultural framework helps to get insights into the archaeological record the first one is to do with these this very recently defined index fossil called elmon beach concave or lake brevet in rectangles it was defined twice in the face of one year in two different articles and these these artifacts are found at sites across central eastern europe dating to sort of the middle of the middle papalolithic and they're a very very distinctive um a very very distinctive group of artifacts um very rectangular backed bladelets with inverse retouch to both ends um either rectangular or rounded ends and mostly quite small and these have been described at numerous different sites now and also so if I look at um some of the work that other people have done some of the work that I've done and then also just go by going through the literature you can see that the distribution of these sites looks probably something like this although there's you know quite a fair bit of checking that needs to be done for a certain person one certain of the sites why is this interesting why why does this matter because if you know anything about um the study of gravetian archaeology in central eastern europe you'll know that shoulder points have long been recognized as being found only in central eastern europe at this time period um this is a really you know well understood well studied um group of artifacts that have a very distinctive distribution but because it looks like the uh lake gravetian rectangles are slightly older in many cases than the shoulder points it suggests that this separation that you get between western europe on the one hand and central and eastern europe on the other hand actually existed before these shoulder points appeared um so for me who's interested in building up a framework of the the epipaleolithic across europe this is you know this is interesting this is important the second example that I want to give you is to do with um and the slovka points which are which last well known this is the artifact type these are quite a bit later than the artifacts I was talking about before their backed points that are surprisingly specific in in them their technology despite I mean you can you can define them quite quite simply but they are very restricted in in space and time they look a lot like fade them as a point some people have described them in fact as fade them as points or as a zillion points but they're they're much earlier and they're from a different uh region and so I think this is where the the distinction I was talking about before about the importance of bringing in geographical and temporal information really comes into play um they're really cute often the blanks are reversed sometimes they use like a hinge fracture as the base they're really nice um and they're found in a much smaller area than the than the rectangles or the shoulder points I was just talking about and so what you can see here looking at the results of this type of this um typological study is perhaps the beginnings of um a picture of fragmentation around the lake uh around the last station maximum this is just you know this is one very small part of the picture in Europe but this is I think perhaps where it's going so typology to me remains an absolutely vital approach I mean people dismiss it very often but I I think it has so much to teach us if we're trying to study the kind of questions that I'm interested in if we're trying to revise the chronocultural framework for Europe which to me urgently um needs doing there are certain things that I think we can improve in the way that we commonly do typology chronological work does remain vital getting decent dates on uneven sites is very important so that we can you know get some uh a strong basis for the comparisons that we're making I think the definitions that we use typologically they think they need to be so clear they need to be so explicit there shouldn't be too much room for interpretation as to whether or not a an artifact belongs to a type or not beyond that we need fuller description we need all sorts of numbers percentages all different ways that we can think of of describing these these types the artifacts themselves the specific artifacts um morphologically and technologically with illustration there are so many different methods that are available to us we need to be taking advantage of all of them and also we just need a lot more data sharing I really I would really like to see a lot more people sharing the actual data that they use to reach their conclusions in their articles and then finally there's all sorts of different things we could be doing with this typological information so not only bringing in the results from technological work but also looking at you know if we if we try to study the same group of sites using personal ornaments using mobility art for example how does that look we're you know where does that get us where does the tension between the results we get from all these different um approaches where does that get us and that's where i'm going to leave it thank you very much