ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on exploring the way in which the material traces of people, discarded at a particular locale – the site of La Cotte de St Brelade, in Jersey, provides insights into the paths and tracks trodden by the people who travelled there. Although it is nearly twenty years since Clive Gamble offered a Palaeolithic framed through locales, rhythms and regions, one might be forgiven for thinking that Palaeolithic archaeologists have clung onto a static and stage-driven model of the Pleistocene past. Historically stone tools have been characterised as end products, the perceived complexity of which directly reflect the cognitive capacities of the makers. Fluctuating Middle Pleistocene sea-levels and shifting erosional and depositional forces impacted dramatically on the physical structure of these landscapes, a major result being significant changes in the availability of particular lithic raw materials and sources to the people who moved through them.
