 Okay, well, today we have our own Meg Kahnke speaking today. It's going to be wonderful. She's, of course, many of you know her work on many, many fronts. But one of them is on the upper Paleolithic. And she's been working there her whole career, I think you could safely say. And so, I'm guessing we're going to hear a lot about her current work going on as well as things linking to all the other aspects that she is so knowledgeable about. And the title is, Catching Up with the Upper Paleolithic, Art Memory and Social Lives. It plans to be a terrific presentation, so please welcome Meg. Thank you. Thank you. It's always great to have somebody make you start making sense of what you've been doing by having to put something together. So today I'm just going to talk here a little bit about some of the things I did this summer but also a little bit of a perspective on some of the many issues and interesting research that's going on having to do with the upper Paleolithic and also having to do a lot of it with pigments and ochre and color that have been in the news lately for all sorts of reasons. So we'll get started here. And I did want to start out by dedicating this talk to a recently deceased colleague, Professor Erika Engelstad from the University of Tromsø Norway. She and her husband Knut Helskog also an archaeologist. Here is visiting faculty members in the 1990s and it's an unfortunate loss and just part of our wider community and I just draw your attention. If you're a first-year graduate student taking 229A, I really stress that you try to read her critique of post-perceptual archaeology for its absolute ignorance if not dismissal of feminist theory in post-perceptual archaeology and more recently again talking about things that are much more than gender and a special issue of the journal Archaeological Method in Theory and again just to play some of the issues that she addresses in context which are involved many of us here is that she was part of a first movement about issues about gender and feminism and archaeology in Norway in the mid-1980s where they started publishing this wonderful journal in Norwegian, it says women in Norwegian archaeology or women in archaeology in Norway but it spells out K-A-N which means we can. So it's really quite good and then another really important edited volume on challenging situatedness, gender, culture and the production of knowledge. So I'd just like to dedicate that to our former colleague who we lost. So today I'm going to mention a little bit of work in paleolithic archaeology that's either controversial and or bears on our own research project in southern France and because it's a little bit about what I did this summer but it's also what I did this summer had to do with some of the things that we're working on. I went to two different conferences, one in Tübingen, Germany and the other in Paris that both sort of are trying to push on our understandings of what we call paleolithic art and then just bring you all up to date as Christine asked me to do a little bit on our research project in southern France which is a early middle Magdalenean open air site in the pre-Pyrrhenes of the southern France especially some of the work doing with colorants but some other aspects as well. So first, I don't know, do I need to remind you about the upper paleolithic or the paleolithic? There's the middle, there's the upper, there's the musterian, the shadowpyrronian, the ordnation, the gravedian, the salutrian and the Magdalenean and you can see our site, we've just sort of placed it right here in the middle of the middle Magdalenean and I don't know if I need to remind you about what paleolithic art is but if anybody doesn't know about painted caves or the hundreds and thousands of artifacts and art objects and statuettes and other kinds of things I'd be happy to provide a little overview at some point about what we know and what we don't know and since we have been donated a set of casts of some of the portable art by Olga Sofer from the University of Illinois and we're about to put this back in the display case but it's out now so I just thought if anybody wanted to see some of the casts of some of these different objects that it's there to look at afterwards. Okay, so one of the really exciting things that's going on is that there seems to be a rush of all kinds of interesting new evidence from parts of Africa, especially about the uses of color and sort of material objects that are many of which are dated much earlier than we ever imagined so and some of it is very much involved with people wanting to say this is the earliest this, this is the origins of that and it's something that I have been concerned about for many years in 1991 with Sarah Williams I wrote an article called Original Narratives the Political Economy of Gender and Archaeology but we also talked about how origins research is really very crucial to what a lot of people do especially in the Paleolithic and so you see articles in recent issues of science which say complex behavior arose at the dawn of humans advanced stone tools, pigment and extensive networks emerged as an environment changed then from a very important site dating to about 300,000 years ago in East Africa, Ola Gorsale, all sorts of evidence of pigment they're tracing the sources of pigment quite widely so some of the kinds of things that people have claimed for much later times many people are finding much earlier times but of course they're also making big claims about what these are all about so it's not just the evidence but it's what we do with the evidence or as David Hurst Thomas used to say it's not what you find it's what you find out and it's the words you use and the way you present it which is all part of some of our more sort of reflexive and ideas about how to do archaeology now in case you missed it I've got a couple of ICYMs in case you missed it there is now well documented interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans and according to 23andMe, to which I submitted my own saliva sample I personally have 306 Neanderthal variants which is more than 88% of the people that 23andMe have tested but it's still less than 4% of my overall DNA but that's okay I like having Neanderthal I've always been a big fan they would not have made it as long as they did they weren't great and adapted and doing all the right thing and then even more exciting I found out that my mother's haplogroup left the Middle East for Europe about 26,000 years ago or just as the upper pellet that was getting into full swing so it's definitely exciting so the other in case you missed it is that there has been a new species or a subspecies identified from a cave in the central Caucasus mountains up here the Denizova cave and exactly what it's going to be called or whatever it is from a tiny finger bone and they've got some teeth and some other things that they've been able to extract DNA from and then furthermore we now know just recently reported this week or this month is that and I don't know why you wouldn't want to use the word trist but then again that's part of the sensationalism that one has to garner I guess but there is now interbreeding between Neanderthals and Denizovans so really quite interesting kinds of connections which if you look at this recent chart about how much interbreeding has been going on the implications for archaeology is that we have for so long said Musterians or Neanderthals made these kinds of tools modern people made these kinds of tools but what happens if you start getting them oh are they three quarters Neanderthal and therefore they're not making these tools or whatever so I think it really has a lot of implications for the tendency for us to try to sort of identify a particular group in this case of hominins to particular technologies to particular groups of material culture and also of course it also sort of impacts the assessment oh it's only modern humans that have these kind of cognitive attributes and only Neanderthals that have these but if we've got interbreeding and so forth this is going to lead to some very interesting reassessments and reevaluations of these attributes that we think are important in understanding human cultural evolution so the latest big controversy of which I have to say I'm a part of was that science decided that a major article should be published about the so-called first artist being Neanderthals because of some dating techniques uranium thorium dating techniques on these skins of calcite that form on cave walls could demonstrate that these artists and you can see what their artwork was a little red this is a nut here and there and dated to 60,000 years ago or more and so these must have been made by Neanderthals well not everybody agrees there was a paper published just recently by some people who are very central to the whole use of that technique especially Maxime Aubert in the Journal of Human Evolution showing why some of those dates may be wrong I'm part of a group and if you can believe this a group of 44 of us who have co-authored a paper again challenging the use of this particular methodology not that we don't believe Neanderthals might be able to have the capability of doing things like that but that actually there's a lot of methodological problems with the uranium thorium dating technique on these caves so and then of course one of the things that the authors here Aubert and others have argued is that there may be red on some of these walls but it's not yet demonstrated that it's either a pigment or a paint that it might actually be part of the natural production of colored what does to us colored material in the cave wall and they also have serious concerns about the methodology as well so that's one of the big controversies swirling along out there and of course it raises really interesting anthropological question what constitutes art and then just today this particular article in Nature a letter in Nature claiming for they have an abstract drawing from a site at 70,000 years old in Brumbos Cave in South Africa they claim that it's a drawing well they call it a drawing and they say that it was done with an ochre crayon well it was done with a piece of ochre but whether it's a crayon also leads you to think that it was a drawing right so the way in which we use words tends to lead to certain interpretation and if you want to see what I have to say about it it was just posted today from National Geographic I had a big interview with them about that and there's a you can just look it up on National Geographic today anyway so those are some of the kind of fun things and they feed into one of the first conferences that I went to this summer which was in Tübingen, Germany the southwestern part of Germany and the title was images, gestures, voices, lives what can we learn from Paleolithic art now this was a really interesting conference it had a lot of different voices, philosophers, art historians archaeologists, ethnographers many people that I hadn't really known about much before but everybody had some interesting perspectives but of course it was not just by chance that they decided to have this conference in this area because it definitely was if you will reinscribing the centrality of this part of the Europe for some very early art forms especially from a series of sites in the Swabian Jura and you'll have to talk to Tim Gill because he's the only one in the room who's excavated at any of these sites unless somebody else has done so and I don't know about it but here we are in the southwestern part of Germany and where's my little thing here so there's a series of sites in these two different river valleys bracing off the Danube here as you can see and they've yielded all sorts of amazing materials statuettes and things made out of ivory from some of them and the Tubingen team has been working there for many years so it's probably natural that not only did they host this conference but they also had a lot of contributions to it now, oops, backwards here so the main question was to critically engage with foundational interpretive frameworks, concepts and ideas and these are all the kinds of things that came up as sort of sections you know what is the relationship between modern cognition homo sapiens sapiens and art soundscapes, you know, what is going on in some of these places that's not just the material culture people talking about what is ochre and the things that it's used for new ways to use ethno-archeology what can we learn from our fascination with paleolithic art the more than human context that one has to include not just the images but the caves and animals and of course something that I was particularly interested in was how to understand paleolithic art as material culture as meaningful practice very good papers on apprenticeship a materiality in my own presentation was a little bit on memory and I drew from the framework offered by Barbara Mills and Ochre on memory work in 2008 and I tried to show the way in which some of the paleolithic art can be understood in some of the terms that are used in memory work in other words there are these incredible array of depositions bones stuck in cracks in one cave far southwestern France there are only 300 objects that were stuck in caves or cracks oftentimes around the materials and this engraving that's going on in this picture here there's very interesting depositions on both sides one of the local raw material the other exotic raw material and then of course certainly there's many things that are crossed out there are images that are accumulated adding things over and over and of course there's a lot of embodied practices as are suggested by some of these photographs and the whole idea is that you know leading from some of these memory making possibilities is that these are parameters on who a maker, a viewer and thus who a knower could be so that was that whole conferences of course they want us all to publish it then the other one I went to was the university the institute or the association of the pre and proto historic sciences it's the international union of pre and proto historic sciences or UISPP and again for those of you interested in the history of archeology if you don't know anything about it you might want to go back to when the world archeological congress was formed in reaction and rejection to the way in which the UISPP was working in 1986 and then there was quite a story written about it by Peter Ako so that's just a piece of history but the particular session I was in there and it was the most disorganized conference I have ever been to in my entire life you could not find who was giving a paper at what time and what room or anywhere but it was just impossible so fortunately we had a lot of really good people in our session and we hung out, we went to lunch and we just couldn't and it bumped into people but we just had no idea and someday I could show you the organizational chart of it which was even more chaotic anyway we're in Paris so who cares and it was a good session and I think that and it was organized by actually two Spaniards one who teaches in Newfoundland, both of whom have been here Oscar was here as a postdoc again in the 90s and of course Manolo Gonzalez Morales was also here for several years with his wife in the 90s and I think that what we came to was best summed up by John Robb from Cambridge a paper which he called it Formerly Art and instead focused on powerful objects social technologies and material culture so I think he really summed up the actions that people went however Sylvia Tomaszkiewa, one of our former PhDs thinks that the term art however is what she calls a useful transfer station and that it can discursively generate leading to other issues and practices if you don't just end up thinking about it as art but what does it lead to and for her with the work she's doing now in South Africa with Petroglyphs is whatever they were intended to be the markers of effort, skill, technological knowledge and a measure of time so I think she's using it and says let's not we probably can't get rid of it it sort of gets us into a discussion so let's use it to go further and to move on all the papers from this session are already signed up for a special issue of the Journal of Anthropological Method and Theory so we all have some work to do right my paper was and all of us were sort of really trying to see how some of these terms have predisposed us to certain ways of doing research and to certain kinds of interpretations and what do we miss if we call them images what do we miss when we call it visual culture and the whole idea is this debate we have over art a distraction or is it useful itself are we kind of mind-trapped what I tried to do was to and I got a lot of really nice feedback about this was that we assume that much of this image many of these images have a certain functions that they function socially they function symbolically and they function really technologically in some sort of ways but I really was trying to challenge those functionalities because everybody when you think that it functions as a symbol or as a technology or whatever you think that it's all intentional and so the intentionality has to be questioned and so I went back to Levy-Strauss 1966 and tried to reclaim the notion of bricolage which is sort of putting things together as you can with whatever's available and the bricoleur who's the person who's doing this and made a good argument for how I think in some senses this is going to work for many of the kinds of things we think is paleolithic art that it may not be as intentional towards art and all of these other big things as we think they are but they actually are taking advantage of where they are what materials they have what the shape of the cave wall is and what sort of things are there so anyway, as you know I'm very big about theory theory opens up your mind then yes, you've ever picked up a rock and then forget why it could be the case okay, now in the last part here I'm going to talk a little bit about our site and the work that we've been doing the site is called Père Blanc it's in the Achaège department in France and this year we just had a study season with a wonderfully marvellously small crew no hordes of people to feed or house or deal with their personal problems or any of that sort of stuff and doing it with my colleagues that I've been working with for some time Kathleen Sterling now an associate professor at Binghamton University also a Berkeley PhD and Sebastian Lacombe also in France the National Research Center in Toulouse as well as at Binghamton University Pat Patrice Bonifou who's actually a Maya specialist but who's been working with us for about 15 years then Joelle Nivens who's a PhD candidate she's going to file my November at NYU and then a graduate student also a PhD candidate Nathan Climbara at Binghamton University so it was a good small compatible focused group which you actually get things done which is great now Père Blanc is a site is located in the Veeway south of France here we are down here in the foothold of Pyrenees and in the region the site is about here along this path that goes through the woods in a today wooded environment maybe not the place you would expect to find an open air site but of course in the Pleistocene there were no trees right so it was not a can you still get me? Arf wherever you are do you still have me? okay and what of course what you can see here is a lot of open fields which we had been working in since 1993 doing regional survey and so for us to end up finding the best possible site in the wood is pretty ironic now we never would have been able to find us without the pioneering work of none other than the paleolithic archeologist known as Kent Lightfoot who visited us and he was down here in this cornfield so close but not quite I think I detected it this is a big site I get no credit here you are what the hell is going on? yeah which mic is it? this mic you want it underneath? does that work? okay I keep getting thumbs up from back there anyway so thank you Kent for your dedicated work with our augers samples there in that wonderful little cornfield which probably has stuff in it because it came down the hill yeah you did right so we have been working there this is what the view is like once you get out of the woods a little bit you can see the whole ridge line there is a journey in chain of mountains right there and of course some of the rolling hills the site itself was located on this path that goes along the top of the ridge and these are some of our structures covering our excavation units but it gives you a sense of being in a wooded environment of course there's many challenges to that fortunately the landowners have been really great about it and said that we can cut down anything except for the oaks so we've been doing a lot of forestry and brush whacking and so on and so forth it makes it especially hard for the laser transit the EDM there to shoot things when you've got trees in the way people are sometimes holding trees back like this while they can shoot it through and then letting them go right anyway so we've done eight years of excavations and so we decided that in 2018 we really needed a study season because of course everything well you all know this it's time to stop Monday we're leaving on Saturday we're excavating Monday no we gotta keep going we might find something Tuesday we're still excavating Wednesday we're still excavating Thursday okay pack it up get it into the storage area and leave right it's in France we can't work with it like some of you who work here so now the idea is that of course everything is stored by year but that doesn't make much sense to know what's coming out of a site that may be going for you know like a hundred meters so what do you do so you go in and you take everything out and you start putting everything back together with its unit rather than with its year so by year within the unit so that's what we did this summer got everything out thousands tens of thousands of artifacts and just worked away on it of course the most spectacular thing is this so called structure that we've been excavating for a number of different years about ten meters wide but I'm not going to talk about that today because you all can just read our article about it soon to appear in current anthropology and so I mentioned a few things about this structure but it's really very interesting because it's not really got any parallels anywhere else that we know of they're definitely little working areas such as here and whether we're trying to figure out exactly what it is, what it looked like this part is very different the hypothesis one hypothesis still is that it might be a burial because it's covered in a tumulus sort of way with these different kind of sandstone slabs and then this was sort of more of a working area that was possibly backed up against the path and the top of the ridge is right behind it so I'm going to get Lisa and me out of there for a minute to show you this exposure here of eroded bedrock and the path is right about here so was something like this structured and built up against exposed bedrock that's one of our problems and I'll mention a little bit about what we're doing about that so the excavated area covers about 80 square meters more or less, probably a little more now we've got three different sectors the structure in the far east central section where we started the excavations and then the western sector which is after this summer's work we are thinking a little bit more about how important this area was it seems as if all of the exotic flints almost all coming from the west all started out here and then find themselves in different shapes and forms redistributed throughout especially over in the structure so there seems to be a real connection there so although we'd really like to just finish the excavation of the structure we think we also have to do a little bit more in the western sector as well and then the question is what did the landscape look like when the Magdaleneans arrived so here we see our eroded bedrock that's at the top of the structure here is the path and then here is the ever vigilant ever active geologist Bill Dietrich from the department of earth and planetary sciences here and his idea was let's see if there's any bedrock over here underneath the soil and he started pulling out of all of these pieces and has submitted samples for what's called cosmogenic-nuclide analysis which what is involved in that is that as we're exposed cosmic rays well they hit everything so cosmic rays are hitting and they have certain isotopes that they influence and you actually can from the rate that you're getting of the isotope in this case we're looking at BE10 is actually can give you a rate at which the soil was covering or the soil production rate so we can guess we can evaluate or estimate this time that these rocks were actually exposed to getting hit by cosmic rays so it's really sort of a very cost so we have this case this data just came in like just this week so we find that the soil production here was enough it was covered in the last 10,000 years but it's very likely it was visible and above ground when the Magdalenians came 17,000 years ago so we're going to try to do a reconstruction of the landscape and what effect that might have had on the placement and the structure with the sandstone slab so that's been really fun in fact I was just on email with Bill in the middle of the night last night about this anyway the other thing that we've got which is pretty unusual I mean we have great lithics they're very interesting both local as well as exotic and maybe my colleagues Sebastian and Kathy they will come sometime in the spring and they can talk about lithics that's great I'm going to talk about pigments because we've got a lot of them and we've got some that are part of the sandstone that's degrading because the site was often in standing water it's at the top of the hill we're clearly just sitting there there's no erosion if Bill Dietrich says there's no erosion there's no erosion he is the most skeptical geomorphologist I've ever met everything is moving all the time one day he even calculated how far the earthworms that we have yes we're in a wood how far the earthworms we're pushing artifacts around so Bill goes that could have moved 5 inches could have moved a foot in 17,000 years the little earthworm just going along anyway so what we have is this degrading sandstone that yields coloring materials but we also have a piece of quartzite that doesn't belong at the site and it's clearly got embedded pieces of manganese in it one of the more fun things is that we've got some in this clay we've got some very purple pigments which are totally rare in Upper Paleolithic art there are only four instances of purple one of which is at a cave site called Marsoulis 12 kilometers away with which Pair Blanc already has many similarities including the time, the lithic technology and now this is all in purple although you can't really see it here I don't think yeah right first team wants to see the purple right yeah this is purple right this is purple yeah so and then you can see some of our different samples and so Philip Walter came and did the analysis of the manganese showing that he's from the University of Paris and probably one of the major pigment and coloring materials specialist in France and he again showed that the black manganese at Marsoulis this nearby site are very similar whether they're coming from the same sources or not so it turns out that there are some pigment connections to be made if it turns out this way it will be one of the first examples to show a significant relationship between an open air site and a painted cave site and of course for us this really is helpful for us to link sites in terms of a better understanding of the social geography and one hypothesis is that the two sites are linked as an aggregation site even if they're not in the same place but in two different locations they're nonetheless part of a system of activities and so forth there is another possible example of such a thing in the general region and that we also then are starting to think that given that it seems as if some of these degrading sandstones are producing materials suitable for coloring maybe we can also think of Parablanck as a provisioning place for pigments that people were coming there and we really need to get on it in my court with Joelle to start finding the sources for the okers so Joelle has been a godsend she's a PhD student finishing up her work at NYU working on some of the ordination pigments from the door done and the ways in which the okers were being used not for coloring properties themselves but as material to abrade and rub on shells and tools and beads to make for them lustrous and to shine so it's really polishing using the ochre to polish and to make things lustrous which is really exciting so we now have over 150 samples of pigments and she's doing a fantastic job of classifying them looking at them getting the characterizations of them we have manganese we have a mudstone we have this degrading sandstone and we have lots of hematite and some of the hematite has striation marks in it showing that it actually had had been used so thank you Joelle and I just wanted to remind you that again we get so excited looking at colors and thinking it must be for quote-unquote art that actually there's lots of other uses for some of these minerals and as I say what she's found is the way in which hematite is used for a lustrous finish it's well known that ochre is used for tanning hides that's really you know so a lot of the pigments we get and I'll show you a slide in a minute on some of our stone tools may well be from the tools that were used to tan hide that they're very good for that they're also I found this in the literature they actually have photo protective characteristics the original SPF and especially in some of the African sites people are suggesting that was at work as a sun block we know it's useful as a glue it's very well known for halting and it's of course sourcing is not easy which is one reason why one of the papers was so exciting because they've actually been able to find some sources for the hematites and pigments they've been using there but we have some ochre with mica in it which really sparkles and which is really great and it's all concentrated in one little place within the structure so somebody's got a sort of a hold on all of the sparkly hematite who knows who that was right so as you can see we were unexpected to find so many lithics with intentional ochre on them so we've got quite a few of them all of those are from the structure they're all in the structure all those units there so that was one of the big and sort of fun surprises so we've just got to keep looking at that and it's about color but it may not be about art so anyway great okay so the invention of the wheel Nico did you give me this? I think you found this image for me human civilization was benefited by the invention of the color wheel which help cave paintings really pop anyway lots of acknowledgment, lots of people, lots of funding many people here at RF and elsewhere thank you and I'll take question any question? Tim, good there's a million interesting things in there but one thing you said and it wasn't really a main point but I wondered if you could comment on it was some of the overlay of different engravings and art pieces of these caves which brings to mind all the multiple layers of engravings all over it which is hard to the modern eye because we're used to art at least you're supposed to color within the lines you know I suppose that one picture there are not 50 pictures of each other and I just wondered if you could comment on that well I think well I think people have long been one of the characteristics of a lot of the images of what we'll call cave art has been this sort of accumulation and you can actually in some places now like at Chauvet they've done a very nice job of pulling it apart what was there first what was added next to actually get the geological the stratigraphic if you will approach to how the images were accumulated there including at Chauvet for example where they even scraped off and made a fresh surface and then put more images on it so I think you know of course everybody says well what are you doing you're ruining the images but of course it's probably not about the image as an image as we think of it as an image it's probably about place it's probably about associations what gets over marked on top of what the location in the cave I mean to me that's one of the ways in which people are remembering and making memory by continuing to put things on top of things I think there's a lot of examples of that but I think it's going to strain our notions understandably of what people think as should be art and it also suggests that maybe the intentionality is not the image in and of itself but the image interacting with other places in the cave wall Lisa I was just going to add a comment that people have proposed that some of these super close drawings are really commotion but we see them today as static images but maybe we're seeing them as a means in western society or western society as far as we're supposed to or we could think of them as moving images representing moving images especially like referring candle legs certainly when they have lots of legs and lots of you know and someone actually brought a non-academic brought a study to my attention that I'll have to see if I can dig out for you that looked at modern children these pictures to make drawings and where they haven't learned that art is supposed to be static so that you know kids will color and they'll color over their drawings again and again and you know it might be the same idea you can ask them with their drawings they were drawing something that was moving yeah well there's increasing work with things like scenes archaeologists in France Mark Azema has done a fantastic job about showing the movement that many of some of these kinds of things are actually not only scenes but scenes that he calls almost cinematic yeah so I was just going to add to that that discusses changing western conceptually on moving images but at one point she has a nice type of discussion about static images having multiple layers becoming a moving picture that we gave but actually my question actually was about asking you to walk me through what makes poker fixed to lithics, where's the intentionality in that, how will you read that kind of thing? I think there is some stickiness inside hematite, I should have brought in I have a little hematite sample that actually enhances the possibility of the things to stick together it's not as effective as something that was also used in the Upper Paleolithic which is salmon the skin of salmon, there's a glue if you take the skin off a salmon or a trout you can scrape some goo stuff and it works very well to have things, a salmon skin glue but the ochre the hematites often have sort of an oily part to them that if you grind them and rub them together you make like a little ball almost not like as cohesive as clay but you can make a little ball out of ground ochre and it has this sort of sticky stuff in it there's an article on how this is done I can send you the reference so when you see the fix to that back micro blade the micro blade itself is being okay? Right, so the back blade could have been inserted into one of many component parts and the ochre could have helped although we do have resin, we have found quite a bit of resin in the site some of it on some tools and then some just little pieces of sort of the sticky resiny stuff which we're doing some chemical analysis on to find exactly what it is Right, yeah Right, any other question? Christine Did you find any evidence of cooking or harms or light No, no we no, we have some we have some burned stones in the structure and we have experimented with some of the stones on the site as to what would turn them that color especially some big pieces of quartzite that were imported and we find that they have to have been in the fire they can't be adjacent to the fire we had some little burnings going on down the pathway at one point to see under what conditions these stones known from right the area sort of get burned the problem with the site we have lots of charcoal it's all scattered it's the standing water problem the standing water has sort of dissolved and dissipated dissipated at all right we've submitted a number of samples there are cases in the archeological world of places where you have combustion features without a specific hearth or something like that and they exist and you know it may be we're doing micro morphology so we get a lot of charcoal and carbon pieces but we don't have anything that tells us Right Right we keep trying I mean we brought Nico out with a magnetometer to try to find you know hot spots and we still actually have one that we haven't sort of done so we do we still have one more to go we've done ground penetrating radar with Scott Byram you know we've drawn all this local talent that we've got here next thing you know we're going to bring Lisa out and anyway so yeah now it's been very frustrating and the main way in which we're attributing the site to a certain period is of course on the one hand on typo technology of the artifacts but on the other hand we do have a series of OSL dates that give us OSL being the optical simulation luminescence where you can date the time that a sand grain has been last exposed to the sun and we've done that the sand it's nice because it is a sandy environment with all the sandstone breaking and crumbling and that does give us the 17,000 date at one part of the site so that's why we would you know we're drawing everything cosmogenic analysis you know OSL because it doesn't look unless we find something unless we find an eco-spot we don't have a heart right yeah but we all have to deal with what we've got the French can say you know OSL we don't depend on to OSL you need a carbon 14 date we also did find a underneath one of the stones because we're starting to lift up the stones from the structure we did find a piece of antler two pieces of antler with a groove in it and we did send one piece not the part with a groove but we did send one piece deaf or carbon dating they couldn't get anything out of it so we just have to hope that there's more it's the second piece of antler we found we have a really clear basal part of a point a beveled basal point of really characteristic Magdalenean bone point so reindeer out of reindeer so we got occasional organics but we're just hoping maybe the sandstone blocks are going to be better preservants than the completely open air stuff right thank you