Diachronic evolution in land use during the Final Palaeolithic and the Mesolithic in the Campine region (Belgium)

Large-scale fieldwork over the past five years has shown that most Mesolithic sites in the Belgian Campine region are palimpsests, generated by repeated occupation. Due to the sedimentological context and post-depositional processes, these occupation episodes are stratigraphically indistinguishable. This severely limits their chronological assessment, perhaps even more than the lack of organic remains for radiocarbon dating, also inherent to these dry sandy soils. By using microliths as chronological markers instead of site assemblages, this paper attempts to bypass this problem and to reach a better insight in the evolution of Mesolithic occupation in the Campine region.