Investigations into the upper palaeolithic settlement history of Europe have made significant advances over the past decades in several fields. As a result of the reappraisal of old collections and the excavation of ‘new’ sites, an extensive data set has become available which can be used to study aspects of the organization of palaeolithic hunter-gatherers. The improvement of absolute and relative dating methods has provided the archaeologist with a more solid chronological framework. Additionally, innovations in archaeological theory and methodology have led to the exploration of new directions of inquiry. This paper focuses on a well-known example of these new directions: the study of regional settlement-subsistence systems of palaeolithic groups, incorporating the systematic evaluation of archaeological data recovered from substantial areas. A growing number of archaeologists dealing with the upper palaeolithic record and active in various regions throughout Europe is currently engaged in this particular form of analysis (Audouze 1992; Hahn 1987; Julien 1987; Straus 1986; Weniger 1987, 1989).

Rensink advocates in favour of a renewed regional approach where the region is not just a collection of known sites. This approach, where the landscape is not considered as being around a site but as including sites, has given very rich results where it has been applied to later periods. But, the impact of man on the environment is quite negligible during the Palaeolithic and gcoarchaeological data cannot provide information about settlement organization in this period as it can in later Prehistory. Using settlements of the same chronological phase to create a kind of typology of settlements has proved useful in order to assess the functional variability of sites within a given region but is certainly a poor substitute for a real region study (Audouze et al. 1988).

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.

I want to devote most of my comments on Rensink's interesting article to the issues raised by his review of current thinking about the Magdalenian of north-western Europe, rather than make detailed observations about the sites referred to in the text. I am particularly interested in ascertaining (as well as I can in such a limited space) the value of a concentration on the analysis of lithic raw materials as a way out of the theoretical morass he believes we have collectively become enmired in. In the course of doing all this I will advance a very simple proposition: that our salvation will spring from a comprehensive revaluation of the phenomenology of upper palaeolithic archaeological records, conducted against a background of concerted exploration of the presuppositions which currently pass for archaeological theory in this domain. Obviously salvation is not going to be easy to achieve, as witnessed by Rensink's brave but unsuccessful tussle with the problem of modelling magdalenian mobility. My central point is that given the magnitude of the task before us we should not expect early success, rather we should continue the process of reevaluation which he has begun.

First of all, I would like to thank F. Audouze, C. Gamble and T. Murray for their written reactions to my article. I see their commentaries as both interesting and informative and the remarks put forward by them as being relevant to regional upper palaeolithic research in general. The value of their comments is not, in my opinion, limited only to researchers of the northern Magdalenian. With this in mind, I hope that the current discussion is seen as a positive development also by palaeolithic archaeologists working in other areas using other databases. Although each of the commentaries vary greatly in content, they all share an important common theme: the value of ethnographic generalizations remains uncertain even for the later phases of the Palaeolithic. That I subscribe to this point of view should surprise nobody who has read my article. It is important that we, in Gamble's words, ‘become our own ethnographers of the Magdalenian’, without doing damage to the heuristic value of models such as those postulated by Binford.