THE USE OF ETHNOGRAPHIC ANALYSES FOR RESEARCHING LATE PALEOLITHIC SETTLEMENT SYSTEMS, SETTLEMENT-PATTERNS AND LAND-USE IN THE NORTHWEST EUROPEAN PLAIN

In this paper the results of the analysis of data on residential and n on-residential settlements in seventy arctic and sub-arctic North Amer ican collector societies are presented. These results are related to t he major resource strategies of those societies, and pertain to the te n analytical domains recommended by Binford (1983) for the analysis an d interpretation of collector settlements. These results can serve as an effective analogue for the diagnosis and interpretation of Late Pal aeolithic Federmesser settlements and land-use practices. Ten fully ex cavated, representative and mutually comparable Federmesser sites are studied (Houtsma et al. in press). One of these is situated in Great B ritain, the others in the Northwest European Plain. By statistical ana lyses of the ethnographic and the archaeological data, the functions o f the ten settlements are diagnosed. Most probably none of these ten s ites represents a residential settlement. The hypothesis is proposed t hat the Federmesser culture constitutes a single language family or pe rhaps a single tribe/society, with part of its residential settlements in the present North Sea.