A spatial analysis protocol to detect human’s activity areas of Middle Palaeolithic open air sites from Northern France.

Modalities of territory occupation are always considered like a goal in Palaeolithic studies. To reach this goal, and bring information about territory traveled by human group, the comparison of several sites management from the same chronoclimatic area is necessary. Different methods allows us now to precise this management and one of them is the spatial organization of human activities, which reflects relationships between different human behaviors. During a long time, the detection of Neanderthal activities areas was complex. The reason is that the only spatial structures visible since the excavations are more or less dense concentrations of archaeological remains. With continue wider excavated superficies and number of remains, the bias linked to the visual approach grow stronger and became too important to be forgot. Today, geomatics and quantitative approaches based on GIS are developing in order to detect and describe more precisely Neanderthal activities areas. This methods allow to confirm the existence of remains concentration zone but mostly to detect structure less or no visible with visual approach. However, we are far to be agree for the choice of the right method with the good parameters and all of them are not equal in terms of results and in terms of reliability. Without a reproducible methodology and comparable results, we cannot propose comparison between management of several Neanderthal sites. With this communication, we propose a spatial analysis protocol adapted to Neanderthal open air sites in order to detect and describe activities areas and their relationships.