 Well, thanks for the organizers for inviting us today. And yeah, the title is a little bit referring, of course, to the system of curated and expedient technologies that Louis Binford had been developing since about 1973, mainly based on completely other material like musterion and archaeological material. And what he wanted to look at was especially the inter-assemblage differences in how they developed over time and in specific places. What we thought was also relevant in this part is that he also mentioned that within a group, so within a site within a group, there are also differences in how much we care and take care of our material, the personal gear will be, for example, for hunting. You want it to be working at the moment you're hunting, so therefore it's very likely that this is very well curated. Whereas, for example, while you're taking an animal apart, it can also be that you're at hoc, do something just like, oh, this cutting knife is not sharp anymore, I just make a new one. So basically what this concept says is that do we have a pointer? No. Okay. That in the curated concept is this concept of taking care of your gear and your material, preparing how to work with it, meaning, for example, that you look for specific raw materials and you collect that first to do something specifically. When you're napping your lithics, for example, you do some preparation so that the outcome is really as you wish it to be. And what follows from this is also that you have a certain standardization of how you do things, how you do prepare your material. But, of course, this also says that you have a very high investment and a high cost in keeping your gear in a good shape if you always, for example, have to look for the specific raw material to do something. So what we will see is a high inter-assembly difference, which is also depending on function, standardization of lithic tools, for example. So the material we find is highly distinct and tends to easily identify in the archaeological record. So, for instance, if you look at the Havilter Point, no, you're not talking about this later, do you? If you find one, you usually know it's one because it's really nicely made, whereas a theta-mesa is a highly discussed topic, at least with us in lithics, what that is. In contrast, the expedient concept is that you use what you have at hand, you're more like flexible using your surroundings and preparing your material, meaning also that you can go into different areas knowing them or you can only go into different areas when you know them quite well. So your knowledge is actually quite high, but the investment at the place is relatively low to keep your gear. And also the inter-assembly difference is rather low, so you can't really say what an assemblage was used for and what it was not used for. So this is actually difficult for us archaeologically to classify if we find something. So what we archaeologists want is the curated concept because then we can make differences in our typologies and everything. But what Vachero and Romagnoli have just very recently summarized this discussion about expedient and the curated and they focus especially on the expedient part and they said like, well, you see, in archaeology, we unfortunately have quite a lot of those and so using those to distinct between groups, transitions and so on is actually very difficult, but this is exactly the problem we do have in Schleswig and Kiel. We have a collaborative research center that focuses on transformations, scales of transformations. How do they work? How do they go? And in particular we are, whoop, that was too quick. We as sort of the group of authors I represent here look at the transitions from the Paleolithic to the Mesolithic in northern Germany and so the Arendt-Spurgy and that is to the Maui Lemosian and what we already see when we look at the sites that we do have, the dated sites, very few because we have hardly any organic preservation. You can see, whoop, here. This grey line is this high peak going up, the beginning of the pre-borial, the distinction between Pleistocene and Holocene, but this red one here, that's the PBO and what you clearly see is that the Paleolithic sites are on the one side of the PBO whereas the Mesolithic sites only start after that in northern Germany so in our sites it's clearly that not the Pleistocene-Holocene turn is also the turn of the sites and of the Paleolithic to the Mesolithic. But what happens in this whole longer time stretch is if we look at, for example, the environment, this is about how Europe looked during the Younger Dryers so you see that in the Baltic we had a rather brackish sea that was fat, unfortunately the red frame is rounded but fat through the belt areas, there were connections to the mainland and it was more an open park tundra environment in our areas where specifically reindeer was roaming but also other tundra fauna but in the south we see the Younger Dryers not that bad you still have very warm-loving fauna there then when we move on to the early pre-boreal the connection just due to uplift in the belt areas goes down again and in the north the ice sheet still covers it so then we have the development of a sweetwater basin in the Baltics not that much water towards the north where we are and the warmer fauna like elk is coming which is still not perfectly warm but a warmer, more temperate fauna and also we see that in the paleological data that we have quite a quick increase and for example birch forests in the beginning we go a little bit further on now actually I have to say the map and the animals do not perfectly match so this is the second part of the pre-boreal when the sweetwater lake breaks through in the north again and has a connection to the world sea again but the animals are rather even further towards the Atlantic time that's when we already can see that a completely temperate fauna including something like rhodea comes up to the north so there are kind of real environmental changes which are kind of connected to the temperature course or the climate developments but how does actually the archaeology evolve? how do humans react to it? and we have here put in a nice photo of one of the largest giant blades as we call them rather than long blades we have here and these kinds of concepts to decor actually a core to prepare to make nice long blades but before have with these very very giant so they are really you have to think they are that wide so it's not like a little wider blade no no no they are wide like that and long like that they are huge but they are just for decoring the core and preparing it for doing getting longer blades this is spread over a relatively long area so this is not just in northern Germany where we have it where we have a good raw material also like for example in the Somme Basin where you also have a good quality of raw material available we have that there we took another very iconic kind of thing that is more considered for the mesolithic which is the duvenzy bone point and you see the area where this is found actually quite in those parts very nicely matches and also shows you that in northern Germany we have the exact overlap here and also time wise you see for the dating we have a considerable overlap of these two technologies coming there so we thought like okay maybe we should prepare or compare the assemblages of the Ironsbergian and the mesolithic that we do have in a little bit more details for example we compared two sites that was Tauquishmitte which is an Ironsbergian site so the red is Ironsbergian and the blue is Frisag 27 in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern or Brandenburg I'm sorry north-eastern Germany and with, yeah it's an early mesolithic site there and we just compared here the length and width of blades something very simple but at least something where we had a lot of data already recorded and what you see is that in general the mesolithic material is a little bit shorter and more sturdy than the longer Ironsbergian material but this can be relatively easily explained due to the raw material sources that are available in Frisag and those that are available in Tauquish in Tauquish the Ironsberg tunnel which is considerably better and then we compared to that the angle of the butt that was basically the angle where it was nipped and found that even though it looks a bit strange here now that is due to the different recording styles this is something we will probably also discuss a little bit tomorrow in the PAM discussion session about the lithic analysis because, yeah, we need some standardization these differences that the one box is on the top of the mean that's mainly due to the recording system but you see so this is Tauquish and that is Frisag and actually the mean of Tauquish is at the lower bottom so what you actually see there is that they are identical if you look at the exact mean they are really almost identical so there seems to be no difference in this napping style and also if you use PCA yeah, thank you for the napping attributes what you can see there is nicely a distinction between the red, the Ironsbergian and the blue, the Tauquish the mesolithic Frisag side and it looks like, oh, yeah, there is a real difference but if you take out length that I had shown before in the blades that this is actually a difference well, it looks like on the top and yeah, you basically see no difference they are very similar, they are very variable all over and that was just two sides that we compared where we had the data Inge-Marie did a wider study she had some more assemblages and also found that the concept of blade production is something that is very, very constant between the early younger dryers the younger dryers, the pre-boreal into the boreal actually, almost and that there are only more like slight and smaller changes happening she concluded that the change at the paleo-meso transition is likely not to represent an adaptation change but a gradual change over time and transformation of the production cycle and also what she pointed out was this technological similarity of the large areas during the younger dryers where probably they had regular contact and close contact whereas in the mesolithic it is rather that it is more diverse and regionalised well, but there we have to say we looked at the course from the Arendt-Bergin in Schleswig-Holstein, northern Germany and the concepts made there that was specifically Mara, Julia Weber and Ludovic Medell and what they found was a high variability in the Arendt-Bergin so our idea of the Arendt-Bergin being a semi-creating technology which have very different assemblages in that sense, yes, we can confirm this the assemblages do look very different but within some of those assemblages the behaviour of the Arendt-Bergin looks extremely expedient so that we actually see some assemblages where it was really like they just took a stone and just snapped and just did their thing and other assemblages where they really cared about their core maintenance and other stuff so, yeah, we were like okay, it's not that easy especially if you're starting off with kind of a group where you have a high variability and not that clear like oh, this is the Arendt-Bergin style of napping we also had a look at the typology and I just show you unfortunately we didn't have a nicer picture yet of the microlythic points that we have from Teltvich 2 also Arendt-Bergin tunnel valley also Arendt-Bergin site and Frizak 27 again and what you see is a relatively high variability in these lithics and that, of course, microlyths appeared in the Arendt-Bergin already and in fact, if you look at when does we were looking like when does the first microlyths appear and it seems like if you have sites like Remuschamp or if you trust the dates of Zunhoofen you have them very, very early on so it seems that they belong to the Arendt-Bergin way of life from the beginning and also the high diversity of microlythic points and if you go to the western parts like west of the Rhine like Belgium you actually also very often have more microlyths than you do have tank points that changes towards the east and towards the north and so for example in our oldest site in northern Germany that we could date Altstufenstadt, we don't have a single microlyth in an Arendt-Bergin assemblage but with Nahö, a site that dates approximately to the middle or starts dating from the middle of the Younger Drives we also do have first microlyths in there so the idea of microlyths being a boundary for polylythic, mesolithic is clearly not working with the Arendt-Bergin part of the world and also when we look at the organic the development of the organic tools we only see that apparently the fish hook appears in the pre-borial and later on the nets do appear but the nets that we don't have nets from the Arendt-Bergin could also be of preservation, so we wouldn't count that too much on that but what we saw in the last years Daniel Behros did a few series and Markus I think helped also with some of the bone points to be dated and when we found that the idea of typical mesolithic bone points they very often dated into the Younger Drives or even some into the Allereu and that this doesn't actually exist but what we saw was that there are singular types appearing and disappearing in the polylythic part but that in the mesolithic part the early developing Holocene that there was a bigger variety or maybe not variety but regionalization of these points so we had several points types that appeared at the same time but in different areas if you look at everything packed together you can clearly see that there is no cut at one point we can see that there are things changing all over time and it's more like a gradual development of how things are going and how things are developing how they are used, how they are invented and that in the Arendt-Bergin this might also be a reflection of these personal ways of how things do these different assemblages might also represent different families deciding, yeah I want my gear to be very perfectly nice made and therefore I need to do my core as my grandpa had done the core whereas others were like, no to get my microlyph point I also can do it in a little easier way so that this already developed in the Arendt-Bergin and that maybe the transition from mesolithic to paleolithic is in generally very much over-emphasized and that there is not that clear cut from the hunters of the paleolithic of these wide areas and steps in contrast to the woodland hunters of the mesolithic that is a little bit too short-sighted it's more complex the picture and especially it seems in northern Germany that the final paleolithic is kind of a complete transitional face and not just one cut we are the transition so, yeah thank you very much and the dating paper will be published soon in Annabelle's paper thank you