Events

Please join us for a lecture by Gillian Wong PhD RPA: The Return to Southwest Germany. When and Why Paleolithic Hunter-Gatherers Settle Here at the End of the Ice Age. The Upper Paleolithic (starting about 45,000 years ago in Europe) is a period that boasts a vast number of archaeological sites with elaborate stone tool cultures, artistic expression, and evidence of human innovation. But mid-way through this period, when ice sheets were at the largest extent of the Ice Age, there is almost no record of people living in Central Europe. After these ice sheets began to retreat, Paleolithic people moved back into this region. This was a time of dynamic changes in the environment and the plant and animal communities – potentially making many of these areas unpredictable for hunter-gatherers. Join us, as we use the archaeological record to explore what it was like for these Paleolithic peoples who eventually chose to settle in one specific region of Central Europe: southwest Germany. When did they arrive? Where did they come from? And most interesting, why did they choose to stay in this region instead of another? Gillian Wong is an archaeologist who specializes in using animal remains from the archaeological record to reconstruct past environments and human behavior. She is a lecturer at the University of Texas at El Paso and an affiliated researcher of the University of Tuebingen in Germany. Her research projects focus on the Paleolithic of Central Europe and the Stone Age of South Africa. She is originally from California and holds a PhD from the University of Tuebingen, a master’s from the University of Utah, and a bachelor’s from the University of California, Davis.