Conclusion
Nicolas VALDEYRON, François BON, Sandrine COSTAMAGNO
Was the ambition of this meeting really a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Would we be capable of defining the criteria necessary to identify a “hunting camp” based on the different elements of the prehistoric and ethno-archaeological record – for the former, extending from the Middle Paleolithic to the Mesolithic and throughout most of western Europe and secondarily the Near East, and for the latter, reaching into Africa and the two extremities of the Americas? Judging by the difficulties experienced by the participants and authors when trying to respond to this question, this would be a logical first conclusion. But in fact, one of the most important, and probably (at least we hope) most productive, aspects of this meeting was the intellectual discomfort we all felt when attempting to determine the function of sites that we should, in principle, be able to consider as the most simple and banal for hunter-gatherers…