The northern Magdalenian, as Rensink so clearly points out, has outstripped the efforts of ethnoarchaeologists to provide descriptive models of how it was organized. Perhaps with hindsight this was always going to be case since the models of land use and mobility which have been developed in the past thirty years were always more at home in the caves and abris of the southern Magdalenian. Here it was possible to describe assemblages as curated or expedient without having to worry too much about variation within sites, such as that now revealed by the complex settlement archaeology of say Verberie or Gönnersdorf. The only added complication in the southern Magdalenian was the cave art, but that could always be treated separately, and may have to be if the 30,000 bp plus dates for the new Ardèche cave are found to spill over into the Dordogne. I therefore agree with Rensink that we must become our own ethnographers of the Magdalenian rather than constantly trying to fit our patterns to those derived from a particular actualistic study. But in this respect it must be remembered that Binford, one of the suppliers of such models, has always warned against working towards definitions; the belief that by naming an assemblage as curated we have done a good archaeological job. Far from it. All we have achieved is a congratulatory nod towards our own descriptive systems. If we are to understand the palpable variation in the archaeological record then we must understand contexts and the conditions for their use which causes patterning in what was left behind. This requires a focus on what we mean by magdalenian society rather than concentrating solely on the properties of the adaptive system.