Contribution of Geographic Information System in definition of human activity areas in Middle Palaeolithic. Examples of Caours and Beauvais (France).

During the Middle Palaeolithic, northern France was occupied only by Neanderthals groups.
Confronted with an important climatic instability, they had to adapt their way of life and territorial
and primary resources management. The study of human settlements and their function in a
territory allow a better comprehension of this problematics, essential for this old periods. The
intrasite spatial analysis will help us to answer those questions through the description of
human activity areas and their interactions, witch lead to to precise the site’s function in a
territory. However, for Middle Palaeolithic sites, we can’t see systematically on the field the
spatial organisation directly, we sometimes need modelization. Therefore, we started to build
a spatial analysis protocol based on a Geographic Information System and rely on sites of
Caours and Beauvais (France). They are two open air sites that are exceptionally well
preserved and displaying a large amount of faunal and lithic rests. Our protocol’s aim is
showing the existence of a spatial organisation in form of artefacts concentration area. We first
hypothesize with mesh analysis – or density, widely used in archaeology. Nevertheless, this
method is limited by subjective choices like that of the mesh analysis. For that reason, we
decided to use another methodology based on artefacts density but also on the distance
between each other: The Kernel Density Estimation. Then, we will specified the function of this
areas in a life space and their interactions through the spatial distribution of different lithic
artefacts and faunal remains.