Neandertal settlements in northern France

How did Neandertals occupy their territories ? How did they organize their movements? These questions were addressed in numerous studies in recent years but remained unresolved for the northern part of France. During recent preventative excavations realized in the framework of large development projects, especially in the Somme Valley, around twenty sites attributable to the Weichselian (116,000 to 11,500 years ago) were discovered. They shed light on the strategies and choices of Neandertals in the management of their territory. In this study, Émilie Goval discusses the notion of territory itself in studies of Prehistory, and particularly during the late phase of the Middle Paleolithic. She then attempts to evaluate the contribution of new methodological tools in the approaches applied by archaeologists to the question of territory. Drawing on ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological examples, and thanks to advances in research on Prehistory, it is now possible, through a spatial approach to typo-technological data, to characterize a territory and analyze its components. The result is a new type of synthesis that enables a better understanding, identification, and thus characterization of the management of space by Neandertals.