Architecture
In open-air sites we find rich evidence for a variety of architectural features indicating that Upper Paleolithic people were more than capable of sheltering themselves. The most frequently found structures are pavements made of river cobbles brought from some distance away. The example shown here is from the site of Le Cerisier, France. These structures, often square or rectangular, were probably the foundations for shelters made from skins and wood or animal bones. The foundation cobbles are almost always burnt, but Jean Gaussen, an important pioneer in open-air research, has shown that they were burned before they were laid down, not after. (Half are burnt on their upper surface, half on their buried surface.) It seems that the builders heated the cobbles in a fire and then arranged them on the ground. Gaussen suggested that people laid heated cobbles on frozen winter ground to form a secure platform. This precaution would have prevented a messy living surface from developing inside a shelter when human activities resulted in melting of the frozen ground underneath.
Sometimes open-air Upper Paleolithic sites show spectacular and unexpectedly complex architectural features. They are especially noteworthy at recently discovered sites in the Ukraine and in the Czech Republic, where the primary building material was the bones of woolly mammoths--and not just one or two of them; in once case, bones of 95 of these 10,000-pound animals were used to make just one dwelling. At Mezirich, Ukraine, the site of this structure, there were three more such dwellings, composing a 15,000-year-old village. The giant bones, which came from the skeletons of long-dead animals retrieved from the surrounding area by occupants of the site, not from animals they had recently hunted. University of Illinois archaeologist Olga Soffer, who has worked at Mezirich, estimates that one of these dwellings (reconstructed at the American Museum of Natural History) would have taken 10 people 5 days to build. If one calculates one nuclear family per dwelling, the site would have housed about 25 people.
