Reflections on Gravettian firewood procurement near the Pavlov Hills, Czech Republic

This paper draws attention to firewood as a natural resource that was gathered, processed and consumedon a daily basis by Palaeolithic groups. Using Gravettian occupation of the Pavlovské Hills as a case study(dated to around 30,000 years BP), we investigate firewood availability using archaeological,palaeoenvironmental and ecological data, including making inferences from charcoal in Pavlovianhearths. The collated evidence suggests that while dead wood was likely readily available in woodlandareas where humans had not recently foraged, longer term occupations – or repeated occupation ofthe same area by different groups – would have quickly exhausted naturally occurring supplies. Oncedepleted, the deadwood pool may have taken several generations (?40–120 years) to recover enoughto provide fuel for another base camp occupation. Such exhaustion of deadwood supplies is well attestedethnographically. Thus, we argue that Pavlovian groups likely managed firewood supplies using methodssimilar to those used by recent hunter–gatherers: through planned geographic mobility and bydeliberately killing trees years in advance of when wood was required, so leaving time for the wood todry out. Such management of fuel resources was, we argue, critical to human expansion into these cold,hitherto marginal, ecologies of the Upper Palaeolithic