| In the summer of 1996, Harold Dibble and Shannon McPherron were
given authorization by the Institute de Préhistoire et de Géologie du Quaternaire and
Mme. Bordes to carry out the research necessary to publish the results of that excavation
according to modern standards of description and analysis. There are three primary
goals of this project
- to organize and maintain the collection before the loss of documentary evidence would
lessen its value for Paleolithic research
- to make public the information that was recovered by Bordes over an eight-year project
at Pech IV
- to use this collection to make new inferences concerning Middle Paleolithic systematics
and adaptation.
After four years (1996-1999) the first two of these goals has now been achieved.
The pages that follow detail the state of the collection and the steps we
took to restore it. The collections have been published
and are also accessible
on-line. A full publication of the data set will come with the
final monograph.
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