ABSTRACT
The Maszycka Cave in southern Poland is an exceptionally well preserved camp site attributed to a single occupation of the Magdalenian III with Navettes (Allain et al. 1985), with 14C measurements between ~14,000 and 15,000 BP. The high proportion of artefacts on bone and antler relative to stone, and a good degree of spatial resolution have lead to this being called a ‘Palaeolithic Pompeii’ (Kosłowski and Sachse-Kosłowska 1993). Groups of processed faunal remains, lithics, organic artefacts and human remains defined several functional areas within the cave’s outer chamber, and the homogeneity of all finds and their recovery from a thin layer indicate that a single occupational episode is represented at the site. At the interpretational heart of the site is the observation that, at least in terms of non-perishable material it is ‘complete’, that is, those artefacts that took considerable time to make and that were usually removed from sites when they were abandoned, are still present at Maszycka Cave. Whereas complete artefacts on bone and antler typically represent ~10–15 per cent of single assemblages they represent 54 per cent at Maszycka and include a ‘rack’ of sagaies. Clearly, the site was abandoned rapidly, and it has been hypothesised that ‘the inhabitants of Maszycka Cave were annihilated by enemies’ (ibid., 121). The lithic assemblage fits well into both Magdalenian and Molodovan types, although the organic assemblage fits more closely with the former. Raw materials represented on the site, other than local flints, include several German flints linking the site to the Magdalenian to the west, as well as Dneistr and Wolhynian flints from the area of the Molodovan to the east. A number of scenarios could account for this; the mobility of these ‘generic’ Magdalenian/Molodovan group could have accessed all of these sources; the occupants could have been culturally Magdalenian and acquired Dneistr flints through exchange with Molodovans, or the Magdalenian occupants could have been murdered by Molodovan or Eastern Gravettian raiders ‘who may not have looked too kindly on the newcomers from the far west’ (ibid., 170).
