Petrified Practice: Is There a Vernacular Choreography of Neanderthal Movements?

Prehistoric stone tools allow for detailed insights into patterns of movements of the human body and the mobility of individuals and groups. As contextualized at the beginning of this chapter, such a behavioural perspective is rooted in so-called “Processual Archaeology”, which we imply as the starting point of our approach, devoted to deciphering vernacular choreographies casting the everyday life of early humans. Here, we use settlement locales on the Crimea peninsula in order to describe three scales of human mobility. All sites were occupied by the last Neanderthal humans, about 45,000 years ago. At a small scale, we reconstruct recipes of stone tool production with gestures of human arms, hands, and fingers, all within the kinesphere or kinaesthetic bodily space of an individual Neanderthal. The embodied performances of knapping are considered “body techniques” in the sense of Marcel Mauss. Two more scales are then dealt with in lesser detail: at an intermediate scale, a small campsite is considered as a choreographic “stage” for movements of the human body, walking, standing, and sitting down, all related to disassembling three animals hunted nearby and brought to the dwelling place. At a large scale, we compare a cluster of settlement sites that supposedly belonged to the same, seasonally geared mobility system, thus describing an annual itinerary of humans through their landscape. As a result, we envisage the option of understanding artefacts and objects as expressions of an ancient practice, geared by vernacular choreography.