During the course of human evolution we have successfully adapted to various climates and
habitats. Interglacial environments in particular offer an excellent opportunity to study
these adaptations. On the north European plain interglacials often correlate with the flooding
of basins resulting in the appearance of lacustrine landscapes. These environments exhibit
remarkable ecological diversity with highly concentrated and predictable resources. Numerous
archaeological sites from the Palaeolithic to the Mesolithic are preserved in these lacustrine
landscapes providing rich sources of potential data. Many of these archaeological sites are
well-known as locations for the procurement and butchering of animals lithic provisioning
gathering vegetal and collecting aquatic resources by humans. These sites are embedded in
wetland deposits with favourable conditions for the preservation of organic and botanical
remains and are thus exceptional archives for detailed analyses of human adaptations to
changing dynamic environments. In a diachronous perspective from the Middle Pleistocene to the
Holocene the current anthology collates studies on differing aspects of interglacial
archaeological lakeland sites illustrating human survival strategies under similar
environmental conditions through the ages. This volume contributes to a core research theme
Human behavioural strategies in interglacial environments of the MONREPOS Archaeological
Research Centre and Museum for Human Behavioural Evolution (RGZM) (Neuwied Germany). The aim
of the research is to undertake a holistic and diachronic analysis of survival strategies under
similar environmental parameters in order to document the evolution of hominin subsistence
behaviour and to gauge whether certain subsistence adaptations arose in direct response to
distinct environmental conditions.
