remains at Pincevent. The excavations, consisting of extensive horizontal exposures, were designed to obtain information on site structure, which was treated as representing a number of settlement floors. Casts were made by Michel Brézillon of entire excavation surfaces, replicating the spatial arrangements of the archaeological remains. Ethnographic case studies were employed to illuminate butchery patterns, and the lithics were subjected to technological analysis and refitting studies to gain insight into the chaînes opératoires (“operational sequences”). These were taken to be forms of expression of mind and language and were therefore of vital importance for the study of cognitive evolution.

In the last decades, many researchers have been involved in analyzing and (re)interpreting aspects of the Magdalenian remains from Pincevent. Refitting and technological studies have been claimed to yield information on the age, gender, and social contexts of the Magdalenian people that visited Pincevent. Several spatial analyses have been conducted; most notably, the hut structures that were tentatively reconstructed by the excavator are now rejected by many archaeologists. Raw material analyses have provided insight into the movement of material, placing Pincevent within a wider regional framework.

Since excavation commenced at the site of Pincevent, it has increasingly acquired a model status, the influence of which reaches far beyond the boundaries of both French and paleolithic archaeology. The meticulous excavation through extensive horizontal exposures and the detailed recording practices have become models for archaeological fieldwork, and the interpretations of the structure of the site have become models for the interpretation of site structure elsewhere. Above all, however, the site of Pincevent has become the archetypal archaeological site. It has provided archaeologists with a template of what an ideal archaeological site looks like and has been used to judge the interpretative potential of other sites. Particular importance is assigned to archaeological configurations stemming from limited time spans of activity owing to rapid burial and to minimal postdepositional disturbance as a result of gentle burial in fine-grained sediments. This template betrays an enduring preoccupation with the ethnographic analysis of archaeological sites. However, discrepancies between the ethnographic approaches applied to it and the structure of the site, despite its excellent preservation and excavation, make Pincevent an important locus for a critique of current frameworks for archaeological interpretation.

Josara de Lange

References

Leroi-Gourhan, André, and Michel Brézillon. 1966. “L’habitation magdalénienne no. 1 de Pincevent près Montereau (Seine-et-Marne).” Gallia Préhistoire 9, no. 2: 263–385.

———. 1972. Fouilles de Pincevent: Essai d’analyse éthnographique d’un habitat magdalénien. Seventh supplement to Gallia Prehistoire. Paris.

Pitt Rivers, Augustus

(1827–1900)

Augustus Pitt Rivers was born Henry Lane Fox, and it was when he succeeded to the large estate of his cousin that he took the Pitt Rivers name. He began his career in the army in 1845 and thus traveled to Malta and Scutari in the Crimea during the 1850s, to Canada during the American Civil War in 1861, and to Ireland from 1862 to 1866, where he was assistant quartermaster-general in Cork.

Pitt Rivers’s interest in archaeology, and in ethnography and collecting ethnographic material, was initially stimulated by the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London and his own collection became his life’s passion. He was part of an upper-class, well-educated group of people who interacted socially with, or were related to, the scientists and social scientists of the day, such as Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill. Pitt Rivers was an an early convert to Darwinism and through membership in the Ethnological Society of London became friends with the antiquarian and politician Sir John Lubbock (lord avebury), later his son-in-law, and the philosopher and politician Thomas Henry Huxley.

While stationed in Ireland, Pitt Rivers explored and surveyed the local historic circular forts or raths, promontory forts, ogham stones