What territories in prehistory? An analysis by networks of places to think of space in the Upper Palaeolithic

Addressed from the perspective of where they were obtained, lithic raw materials found in archaeological sites carry and contain data of geographical value. Thus, they are privileged witnesses to human movements in prehistoric times. By coupling the results of technological analyses with multi-scale diagnostic methodologies based on the principle of an evolutionary chain set up by some of us and recently optimised, today it is possible to evaluate the acquisition modes for raw materials, the manner of their introduction into sites, and better understand the prehistoric management of mineralogical resources. This techno-economic approach, becoming ever more precise, is being facilitated thanks to the results from a consortium of researchers interconnected in the `Reseau de lithotheques' and `Silex' projects. Detailed petro-archaeological studies of an archaeological series make it possible to identify litho-spaces that are not images of territories. Indeed, territories are not only shaped by economic constraints (where space is the basis of a society), but they are the way in which collectives build themselves by conferring meaning on places of singular use linked to each other by a complex network of values. Yet, the symbolic dimension of spaces is a central element in the cultural representations that societies have of it. Rather than limiting the analysis of the territories to the scale of a site, which in the context of nomadic societies is contradictory, it seems more efficient to analyse the relationships between places (i.e. networks of places). Taking as an example current or recently nomadic peoples - for whom networks in which materials circulate correspond to networks of places - we propose a method based on a concept of network analysis in order to escape the point of view based on single sites, and offer an approach to determining prehistoric territories. This side-step not only questions the spatial extent of archaeological records, but also their coherence as chrono-anthropological entities.