PALEOMAP Project

Goal of the PALEOMAP Project

The goal of the PALEOMAP Project is to illustrate the plate tectonic development of the ocean basins and continents, as well as the changing distribution of land and sea during the past 1100 million years.

	In the Earth History section of this website are full-color paleogeographic maps showing the ancient mountain ranges and shorelines, active plate boundaries, and the extent of paleoclimatic belts.
	NEW  App for iPad/iPhone, "Ancient Earth: Breakup of Pangea".  A Scalable, Rotatable, and Completely Interactive PaleoGlobe Animation. Download from the App Store or visit our website, (www.ancient-earth.com), or search for "ancient earth" at the (App Store)
	3D movable Paleoglobes.  Interactive 3D virtual object - globes that you and manipulate, rotate, and view from many angles.  Times available:  Modern Globe, Miocene (20 Ma), K/T boundary (65 Ma), Late Cretaceous (80 Ma), Early Cretaceous (120 Ma), Earliest Cretaceous (140 Ma), Pangea - earliest Jurassic (200 Ma), early Permian (280 Ma).
	3D Paleogeographic Animations.  A sample of the new 3D topographic and bathymetric models that can be visualized as stunning 3D globes.  3D Animations of the Latest Cretaceous,  Cretaceous, Early Permian. and the Middle Devonian.

	(Check these out!) Animations you can view from your Browser.  PANGEA   PRECAMBRIAN    PALEOZOIC  3D-CRETACEOUS     3D-PERMIAN   3D-LATE CRETACEOUS   3D-EARLY DEVONIAN  PACIFIC  N. ATLANTIC  GONDWANA    GLOBAL TECTONICS   NORTH POLE  FUTURE  INDIA  CARIBBEAN   PALEOCLIMATE
	In the Climate History section is a discussion of how and why the Earth's climate has changed through time.
	Future Maps showing positions of continents in the future and formation of "Pangea Ultima"
	Paleo-Globes (4" diameter spheres)  Make your own Paleoglobe ! and ESH-GIS 1.0 (ArcView), the first Earth History Geographic Information System.

	In the Methods section, find out how these paleogeographic maps were made, what the scientific basis for the maps are, and what software was used to produce the maps.
	The Atlas has been 30 years in the making.  In the  History of the Atlas section describes the who, when, what and where that went into producing the Paleogeographic Atlas. A  list of Key References is also provided.
	License Information  If you would like to use PALEOMAP images or 3D digital models give us a call  (888 288 0160) or email  us at cscotese ( at ) gmail.com.

MapCarte 264/365: Plan oblique relief Europe by Jonas Buddeberg, Bernhard Jenny & Johannes Liem, 2014

MapCarte 264/365: Plan oblique relief Europe by Jonas Buddeberg, Bernhard Jenny & Johannes Liem, 2014

Click the image to view the web map Representation of terrain is as old as cartography itself and there remain numerous ways of creating interesting effects. Plan oblique can be traced back to the work of Xaver Imfeld in 1887 (featured in MapCarte 182).

MapCarte 343/365: A deliniation of the strata of England and Wales by William Smith, 1815

MapCarte 343/365: A deliniation of the strata of England and Wales by William Smith, 1815

In a world where many seem rather quick to suggest their map is 'the first to show...' it's refreshing to be able to show actual firsts from the world of cartography that exhibit good design. English geologist William Smith is credited as the first to have created a nationwide geological map.

MapCarte 94/365: Wood charts by Below the Boat, 2013

MapCarte 94/365: Wood charts by Below the Boat, 2013

Physical models, for instance in the form of globes and vacuum-formed raised relief vinyl maps have been staple ways to depict the world for centuries. They bring a three-dimensional quality to the map that allows us to more clearly see how a landscape looks.

MapCarte 58/365: Karte der Gegend um den Walensee by Eduard Imhof, 1938.

This original image measures 9.6m in width and illustrates he area around Walensee at 1:10,000. Created by Eduard Imhof, the work appeared in his classic text Cartographic Relief Representation which had a single purpose in teaching the means by which to represent relief in maps. This is a painting in gouache that Imhof used to show a plan view portrayal as naturally as possible.
Imhof employed the techniques of a landscape painter. All linear elements that might be produced using woodcuts, etchings, engraving or lithography are removed since they are abstract and do not appear in a natural landscape. No aerial photographs or existing maps were used as underlay. The result is a beautiful, aesthetically pleasing impressionistic painting yet one that is highly accurate.

As Imhof himself explained “In detail, the interplay of surface colour, vegetation colour, light and shadow, of reflections and aerial perspective are shown. According to their location and the basic tint of the ground or ground cover, the shadow tones are India red, brown, grey, blue or deep green. Contrast effects also play their part. Even shadows are often lightened and varied in colour by reflected light, but cast shadows are strongly deepened. A slope bathed in sunlight appears bright ochre or yellowish red, but in shadow it is a deep red violet. In a large scale portrayal such as this, with its simple and powerful relief forms, the coloured mosaic of ground cover influences the colour of the depth effects but does not destroy them”


The virtual library of Eduard Imhof is here.

A CONTEMPORARY DERIVATIVE OF A PORTOLAN CHART.

This map of the Black Sea takes its coastal outline and names from a portolan chart, but it omits the navigational rhumb lines. It is from a manuscript island book, the Insularum illustratum, by Henricus Martellus Germanus, who worked in Florence ca. 1480-96.

To the historian of late medieval and early modern European cartographyl the portolan charts are fundamental documents, if mysterious in their origin and precocious in their precision. Their importance has long been acknowledged, and "The First True Maps" was the enthusiastic title of an article by Charles Raymond Beazley in 1904. More recently, Armando Cortesao considered the "advent of the portolan chart ... one of the most important turning points in the whole history of cartography." Alberto Magnaghi went further, describing them as a unique achievement not only in the history of navigation but in the history of civilization itself. For Monique de La Ronciere the work of the first named practitioner, Pietro Vesconte, was so exact that the Mediterranean outlines would not be improved until the eighteenth century. In terms of the economic history of cartography, Vesconte and his contemporaries may have been the first, in the plausible opinion of a recent writer, "to pursue mapmaking as a full-time commercial craft.

From the earliest extant copies, probably a little before 1300, the outline they gave for the Mediterranean was amazingly accurate. In addition, their wealth of placenames constitutes a major historical source. Their improvement over the Ptolemaic maps relating to the same area is obvious at a glance, and the North African coast with its clearly defined Syrtes is the most striking advance. Moreover, the Ptolemaic maps began to circulate widely through Europe only in the fifteenth century, by which time the portolan charts were well established. Though a linear scale was implied on Ptolemy's maps by their grid of longitude and latitude, the medieval sea charts were the first cartographic documents to regularly display one. This should be contrasted with the history of European topographical mapping, which shows that the first local map since Roman times to be drawn explicitly to scale was a plan of Vienna dating from about 1422.8 As P. D. A. Harvey further points out, virtually no local maps produced during the period under discussion, that is up to 1500, made "the slightest attempt at consistency of scale.

An even greater gulf divided the portolan charts from the medieval mappaemundi, the cartographic content of which was largely shaped by their theological message. It is worth recalling that the earliest known portolan chart is thought to be almost exactly contemporary with the Hereford world map. It cannot be claimed, of course, that the portolan charts were totally free from what today we call superstition, but neither were medieval sailors. Yet Prester John, the four rivers of paradise, the mythical Atlantic islands, and other legendary features found on some charts are all placed in the little-known interior or around the periphery. The continental coastlines that constitute the charts' primary purpose are in no way affected. The unidentified author of the Genoese world map of 1457, whose depiction of the Mediterranean is based on the portolan charts, neatly sums up the chartmakers' attitude: "This is the true description of the world of the cosmographers, accommodated to the marine [chart], from which frivolous tales have been removed."

The medieval sea chart is the clearest statement of the geographic and cartographic knowledge available in the Mediterranean. Occasionally the coverage was extended to the East, as in the case of the Catalan atlas. Contact with China, however, ceased after the mid-fourteenth century with the collapse of that Tatar empire at which the Polos had marveled. But in the West the portolan charts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries provide the best, and at times the only, documentation of the first chapter of Renaissance discovery-the exploration of the Atlantic islands and the charting of Africa's entire west coast. The Spanish and Portuguese seaborne empires whose foundations were to be laid by Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama were the fruits of these preparatory voyages.

The medieval mappaemundi are the cosmographies of thinking landsmen. By contrast, the portolan charts preserve the Mediterranean sailors' firsthand experience of their own sea, as well as their expanding knowledge of the Atlantic Ocean. They are strikingly original, signaling, as Gerald R. Crone pointed out, a "complete break with tradition." Whatever their antecedents might have been, these cannot be identified with any confidence today; but this is only one of the many unanswered questions these documents pose. How was the prototype constructed and when? How were copies manufactured for some four hundred years without steadily increasing distortion? Did the Catalans influence the Italians, or vice versa? And most fundamental of all, what was their function?

Madaba Map

Discovered in a church in Madaba, Jordan, in 1884, the Madaba Map is the oldest surviving cartographic depiction of the Holy Land. Created in the form of a mosaic it dates to somewhere between A.D. 560-565 and originally showed an area that stretched from southern Syria to central Egypt. By the time it was discovered much of the map was already gone, however its remains include a detailed depiction of Jerusalem. "The bird's-eye view shows an oval-shaped walled city in the very center of the map with six gates and twenty-one towers, the colonnaded main thoroughfare … and thirty-six other identifiable public buildings, churches and monasteries," writes Jerome Mandel in an article published in the book "Trade, Travel and Exploration in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia" (Routledge, 2000). At the time it was created the Byzantine Empire ruled the Holy Land. 

On the sixth-century mosaic map of Palestine that paved the floor of a church in Madaba in Transjordan, Jerusalem holds a dominant position (Avi-Yonah 1954: 50-60, plate 7, nos 52-3). The colonnaded main street of Hadrian's Aelia Capitolina, the cardo maximus, is clearly visible, running southwards from what is now the Damascus Gate in the direction of Mount Zion, which lay outside the southern city wall until changes brought to the line of the city wall at the time of the Empress Eudocia in the middle of the fifth century. In a distinguished central position on the west side of this street, breaking the colonnade, are the steps leading to the propylea of Constantine's basilica; its three doorways are clearly visible. The complex of buildings on Golgotha is the largest edifice depicted, and is clearly meant to be seen as the focal point of the city, culminating in the domed rotunda which by that date covered the Holy Sepulchre. The steps leading directly to the main entrance of the basilica off the street recall Eusebius' description of its fronting onto the main thoroughfare. 

The deliberate emphasis on the central position of the Constantinian buildings at Jerusalem on the Madaba map reflects the importance of the Constantinian foundations. If Jerusalem was for the Christians the centre of the world, then the centre of Jerusalem itself could only be the place of Christ's death and resurrection. By contrast with the church of the `Upper Room' where the Jerusalem community had worshipped down the ages, tucked away outside the city on Mount Zion, Constantine's Holy Sepulchre was on the site of the Hadrianic temenos, alongside the forum and near the central crossroads, approached by an impressive flight of steps from the main thoroughfare; the new Christian monuments, and no longer the pagan temples, were the highlights of the city. 

Thus fourth-century Jerusalem saw Christianity symbolically transported from its place outside the walls to the very heart of the city. Roman Aelia was now the Christian Jerusalem. It was Constantine's creation of the `new Jerusalem' of Rev 21:2 - `And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband' - which lay at the heart of the Holy Land's emergence as a goal of pilgrimage in the fourth century (Hunt 1982).

Himalayan rivers and snow from the space station

(Source: NASA)

As the International Space Station flew 418 kilometres above the Himalaya Mountains, the crew snapped this photograph of the snow-capped panorama unfolding near the China-India border.

This image taken on April 8, 2015 - just over two weeks before the magnitude 7.9 earthquake hit nearby Nepal - shows the foothills of one of the main ranges of the Himalayas, where peaks cast strong evening shadows on the snow.

The mountains in this image reach altitudes of 5200 metres. Other peaks just beyond the upper edge of the image reach even higher altitudes of more than 6500 metres.

The flat areas at the base of the mountains are ancient alluvial fans, filled with sediment eroded from the high mountains over millions of years.

Snow cover highlights these strikingly smooth surfaces, which are cut through by a trellis-like network of gullies casting sinuous shadows.

The large river on the right of this scene has cut a 500-metre-deep canyon.

Although the rivers in this image drain northward from the Himalayas, they ultimately flow back to the south, accumulating in the Sutlej River (out of shot) which passes through the mountains toward the lowlands of Pakistan and, finally, empties out into the Arabian Sea.

The Himalayan Mountains are among the youngest mountain ranges on the planet, and were formed by the collision of the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates along a 2400 kilometre arc which reaches its greatest elevation of 8848 metres at Mount Everest.

The Indian plate is continuing to drive horizontally beneath the Tibetan Plateau at a rate of about 67 millimetres per year, creating uplift in the Himalayas of about five millimetres every year and causing occasional large earthquakes such as the recent Nepalese quake.

EARTH IMAGE by Stuart Gary
ABC

Rivers of red leave their mark on Iceland

(Source: NASA/USGS/LandSat 8)

A river of red hot lava spreads across Iceland's Holuhraun lava field.

Lava started gushing from fissures just north of Vatnajökull ice cap and the Dyngjujökull glacier (seen as blue at the bottom), in the Icelandic Highlands in August 2014.

Since then the field has covered 84 square kilometres, making it Iceland's largest basaltic lava flow since the Laki eruption of 1783-84, an event which killed 20 per cent of the island's population.

The average thickness of the field is 10 to 14 metres, and nearly 1.4 cubic kilometres of lava by volume was extruded from the Earth during the eruption.

A new lake is expected to form when summer melt water runs off of the nearby Vatnajökull glacier.

On 28 February 2015, Icelandic authorities finally declared the eruption over.

While fresh lava has stopped flowing from Holuhraun, it is possible that activity could resume.

The eruption was fed by the Bárðarbunga volcano about 41 kilometres to the south west.

Volcanologists monitoring the area report that Bárðarbunga's caldera has started rising, a sign that magma may be accumulating in the magma chamber again.

Iceland is both located above a mantle plume, and straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ocean ridge along which new crust is created, spreading out to form the North American and Eurasian continental tectonic plates.

This spectacular volcanism double whammy makes the island one of the most active geological places on Earth.

The false colour image of the lava field was captured in September 2014 by Operational Land Imager aboard NASA's LandSat 8 spacecraft. It was created by combining shortwave infrared, near infrared, and red visible light bands, to better show variations in the temperature of the lava.

This particular band combination also makes it easier to see through the plume of steam and gas rising from the fissure.

EARTH IMAGE by Stuart Gary
ABC

War games in an eighteenth-century German military academy

War games in an eighteenth-century German military academy, Hans Friedrich von Fleming, DervolIkommene teutsche Soldat (Leipzig, 1726). In this elegant room, four sets of instructions seem to be going on at the various tables. Above the tables on the right, there are on the wall two large panels setting out the calibres of the artillery, and on the wall at the end, five instructors seem to be discussing the best way to assault a well-defended sea port, looking something like La Rochelle.

In France much the same sort of development was taking place. In Leparfait aide de camp, published at Paris in 1770, Georges-Louis Le Rouge (active 1730-70), 'ingenieur et geographe du roi', explains how during the 1740s and 1750s it had been found necessary to train young aides-de-camp in bringing the most recent topographical and military information to the general officers whom they served, often using maps. Probably the leading exponent of military map use in France at this time was Pierre Bourcet (1700-80), whose book entitled Lesprincipes de la guerre de montagne (Paris, 1775) explained how 'a commander should plan troop manoeuvres and supply on a day-to-day basis from maps') As yet, though, these relatively detailed maps relied on hachures (striations marking hills) to indicate the terrain: there were no contour lines until quite far into the nineteenth century.

Meanwhile the same type of development was taking place in Brandenburg-Prussia, where Frederick the Great (ruled 1740-86) used officers like Major Von Wrede and Major Von Griese to manage a travelling Plankammer, or map-office, from which material could be generated for most contingencies. Frederick's own Instructions for his generals insist upon the use of 'the most detailed and exact maps that can be found', for 'knowledge of the country is to a general what a rifle is to an infantryman and what the rules of arithmetic are to a geometrician'. Frederick was of course in close touch with what was going on in France and England, and probably used specialists from these countries.

Above picture, taken from Dervollkommene teutscheSoldat, published at Leipzig in 1726, shows how thoroughly the study of maps was penetrating the German military academies. Groups of students are seen examining them at tables alongside the walls, while at the end of the room a large map sets out the details of a siege. Such an image is impossible to imagine for the sixteenth century, but by the middle of the eighteenth century armies had become so large that some form of cartographic control had become absolutely indispensable, along with standardized written orders, fighting groups of about 12,000 men, and trained general staffs; this was all part of a process of growing bureaucratization. Indeed, the military hierarchy and procedures that developed at this time would have been quite recognizable to twentieth-century soldiers.

John White, Map of part of the east coast of North America, 1585

John White, Map of part of the east coast of North America, 1585. John White was the English equivalent of Jacques Le Moyne in that, taken to the New World in 1585 on an English expedition as illustrator, he turned out to be not only an excellent portrayer of the local Indians, but also an accomplished cartographer, as this map shows. It stretches from Florida (lower left) to the Outer Banks, showing the coastline, reefs, and islands in some detail.

Two curious instances of artists turning cartographer come from the early European settlement of the east coast of the United States. When the French decided to establish a colony on the Saint John's River (in Florida) in 1564, they recruited Jacques Le Moyne, Sieur de Morgues. Until then he had been, as Quinn puts it, 'trained to paint flowers and fruit in the manner of traditional miniaturists', but on the expedition 'he had perforce to become a cartographer and found himself making sketches of river entries and eventually compiling a general map of the areas the French reached'. This map was eventually printed by Theodor de Bry in America, part I (1591), together with a dozen or so of the sketches of smaller areas. The manuscript original of the map has not survived, but from the printed copy it is clear that Le Moyne was quite capable of offering a novel and reasonably accurate delineation of a part of the coast that until then had not been well known to Europeans

Much the same could be said of John White, who as a journeyman painter accompanied Martin Frobisher on the voyage to Baffin Island in 1577. There he made excellent sketches of Eskimos, which is no doubt why he was then assigned to Sir Walter Raleigh's expedition to Virginia in 1585. Here he collaborated with Thomas Harriott upon a quite extensive mapping programme, from which several manuscript maps and sketches survive. The area round the Outer Banks, which White knew personally, is best shown, but the delineation of Florida and the islands is also passable. Like Le Moyne, White seems to have been able to switch quite easily from one mode of representation to the other: as Svetlana Alpers puts it, mapping was still 'a casually acquired skill. We do not know much about White's later life, but he does not seem to have drawn any more maps; as for Le Moyne, having escaped the murderous Spanish attack upon the French settlement, he went back to his exquisite studies of plants and insects.

Case-Study - Seasonal Mobility in the Auvergne

The magnitude of raw material transfers between the Auvergne sites and sources 250-300km further north illustrates a case of continuity in mobility patterns across the Middle/Upper Palaeolithic divide, which is consistent with the cultural ecological paradigm. Considered in a techno-economic perspective, these transfers also reinforce previously stated diachronic differences. 

A hilly relief and a globally rough climate characterize the Auvergne, in the central part of France. During colder periods, local glaciers covered the higher altitude zones that border the Loire and Allier valleys, along which there are clusters of sites, both Middle Palaeolithic and Upper Palaeolithic (Gravettian, Protomagdalenian, mostly Badegoulian and Magdalenian). All of the Upper and some of the Middle Palaeolithic sites contain northern flint from the Touraine and the Paris Basin, the former sites in large quantities. In this respect, it is significant that flint is scarce and generally of poor quality in the Auvergne. 

The Auvergne is considered to have been a region of severe seasonal contrasts throughout the Upper Palaeolithic, particularly inhospitable during the winter months. The absence of any winter hunting in the sites further suggests that human occupation was seasonal in the area. Working on this assumption, it is contemplated that in the Upper Palaeolithic the procurement of higher-quality northern flint was embedded in subsistence strategies and occurred in the context of planned seasonal moves. These followed natural routes connecting flint yielding regions and others known to be lacking suitable raw materials.

Northward long-distance winter moves from the Auvergne (France), following natural routes leading to areas yielding highquality flints. Both Middle and Upper Palaeolithic sites contain Touraine and Paris Basin flints, but the procurement of large quantities of such flints is only documented for the Upper Palaeolithic. Figure composed by G. Monthel (UMR 7055 du CNRS).

Long-distance seasonal mobility (ranging between 160 and at least 250km in the Upper Palaeolithic) is a pattern argued to obtain in ECE. Explaining the Auvergne long-distance seasonal moves in terms of adaptive responses to environmental constraints is supported by the enduring northern origin of raw materials across the Middle/Upper Palaeolithic divide. However, the quantities recorded for the Middle Palaeolithic are very small. A similar case of continuity in transport and mobility strategies is documented only in ECE, in Moravia, where northern trans-Carpathian flint systematically occurs in Middle and Upper Palaeolithic sites, conveyed along natural routes (the Moravian Gate). As in the Auvergne only poor quality flint is available in Moravia, and it is also only during the Upper Palaeolithic that trans-Carpathian transfers are associated with large quantities of raw materials, rather than with a few end-products. Indirect Procurement Drawing on ethnographic parallels concerning the exchange of highly valued items by down-the-line trade over extreme distances, special attention has been paid to the longest transfers (300 km) acknowledged in WE, WCE, and ECE. These always involve very small quantities (generally a single item) of end-products, often in remarkable materials, such as obsidian or white-spotted Świeciechów flint in ECE, which account for half these transfers and may have been invested with more than utilitarian properties. 

Eastern Central Europe

In ECE, such very long transfers are recorded throughout the Upper Palaeolithic, beginning with the Szeletian and the Aurignacian, which partly overlap in time. It is argued that three of the four 300 km Szeletian transfers may result from a down-the-line mode of exchange.

Indirect procurement by down-the-line trade through social exchange in the Szeletian and the Aurignacian of ECE (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic). Figure composed by G. Monthel (UMR 7055 du CNRS).

Items made of eastern materials from the Tokay and Bükk regions (obsidian and felsitic quartz porphyry, 360 and 340 km) are recorded west in Moravia, at Neslovice. Obsidian and felsitic quartz porphyry are abundant in all the Bükk area sites. Felsitic quartz porphyry is also documented at a halfway point in some Váh valley sites, construed as `relay' sites. In addition, the presence of the characteristic raw material of this valley, radiolarite, is recorded in both eastern (Bükk) and western (Moravia) sites. In a similar way, the Świeciechów flint item from northeastern Poland found in Moravia, at Mis¡kovice (360km), alongside with Kraków Jurassic flint, is argued to have been conveyed through the Kraków region sites, where Świeciechów flint items are recorded, as well as items in `chocolate' flint, of similar northern origin. In the Aurignacian, indirect procurement can be contemplated for two of the four 300 km transfers. One is associated with the presence of Świeciechów flint in Moravia, at Urc¡ice-Golštýn (380 km), where Kraków Jurassic flint is also recorded. There again, the Kraków sites, which yield some Świeciechów flint (three items at Kraków-Sowiniec), can be interpreted as `relay' sites. Another transfer is associated with the presence of 10 obsidian items at Nová Ddina I in Moravia (320 km), alongside with radiolarite, and these were possibly conveyed through the Váh valley sites. 

Western Central Europe

In WCE, only one 300km transfer is recorded, in connection with Hohlenstein- Stadel, an Aurignacian site of the Swabian Jura. It is associated with a few end products in Baltic flint from northern Rhineland (400 km). While in the Swabian Jura, all other long-distance transfers are throughout the Upper Palaeolithic oriented eastwards (240 km) and westwards (220 km) along the Danube River, suggesting direct procurement of materials during (seasonal?) group movement, this transfer is oriented north-south. Small quantities of Baltic flint have been found at the Aurignacian site of Wildscheuer in the Rhineland, some 140km distant from the closest source, and the assumption is that down-the-line trade to southwestern Germany conveyed the items recovered at Hohlenstein-Stadel. 

Western Europe

In WE, basically as a reflection of the state of current research, 300km transfers are so far only acknowledged for the French Aurignacian (n = 2 occurrences). These transfers relate to one item each of grain de mil flint conveyed from western Charente to the Ariège (at Tuto de Camalhot) and the Hérault (Régismont-le-Haut). 

Indirect procurement by down-the-line trade through social exchange in the Aurignacian of WE (southern France). Figure composed by G. Monthel (UMR 7055 du CNRS).

Grain de mil flint also occurs at several of the Vézère valley sites in the Périgord, and two types of northern Aquitaine flints (Bergeracois and Fumel) have been identified at the Tuto de Camalhot and Régismontle- Haut. Indirect procurement by down-the-line trade via Périgord `relay' sites is therefore suggested for the 300km grain de mil transfers. In this respect, it is of additional interest that shells of Atlantic coastal species occur both at Périgord sites and at the Tuto de Camalhot. 

It does not necessarily ensue from the above examples that direct procurement is the only underlying mechanism for transfers <300 km, and possible successive transfers each involving relatively short distances (c. 100 km) can be reconstructed in both WE and ECE, arguing for exchange also on a smaller scale, overlapping that of group mobility. In all likelihood, the observed increase in Upper Palaeolithic magnitudes of transfers can be accounted for by a combination of socio-economic factors - more systematic long-distance moves, exchange within interaction networks - whose respective importance is difficult to assess.