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

During the Middle Palaeolithic, northern France was occupied only by Neanderthal. 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 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 two other methodologies based on artefacts density but also on the distance between each other: The K-mean Clustering and The Kernel Density Estimation. Then, we will specified this areas function in a life space and their interactions through the spatial distribution of different lithic artefacts and faunal remains.