In modern Western culture, thinking and attitudes related to the landscape are dominated by a rational-economic and profane perception of space. We are so familiar with this that we tend to attach a universal, absolute character to this way of thinking. However, research undertaken within various social disciplines in the last decennia increasingly emphasises the specific cultural character of this Western line of thought. The profanisation, rationalisation and commodification of space appear to be processes belonging to the general development of Western culture since the Renaissance, and in particular since the Enlightenment. If we wish to gain insight into the ordering and meaning given to space in other cultures, we have to distance ourselves from these specific Western values. The landscape is not a simple objective fact; each culture has its own specific pair of glasses, through which the surrounding physical space is named, ordered and interpreted. The classification of space and the attachment of meanings to it are therefore pre-eminently cultural constructs. According to Lemaire (1970, 14), space and the perception of space in a culture are not a feature of minor importance, but they express the identity of that culture in a privileged way; if one wants to grasp a culture in its real dimension, one should look to identify the perception and organisation of its space.

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).

Roymans' paper is ambitious – and short. Perhaps a little too short: there were a good many junctures where I felt there was much more that could be said, and certainly the bibliography could be greatly extended. The excitement of the paper lies in the methodological cross-over between archaeological and folkloric materials, which I found both convincing and informative, and in the time-depth that Roymans permits himself. In a rather odd reversal, I felt that the paper was more interestingly complex than the Introduction suggested.

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).

Several years ago, when I visited the Netherlands for the first time, a famous historian with whom I was walking along a road through the polders observed that the national character of the Dutch had formed through many centuries of efforts to shape nature, and that nature in its turn bears the imprint of their character. I was greatly interested by this remark on the interaction between mentality and landscape and I asked my colleague to write an article on this subject for the periodical Odissei. Chelovek v istorii (‘Odysseus. Man in history’), which focused on issues of historical anthropology and which I am publishing for several years. Although unfortunately I did not receive the article as such, I was all the more interested to read Nico Roymans' work. The perception of space and landscape does in truth change through history and it would be incorrect to interpret the natural environment as a rigid framework in which the history of mankind unfolds. It is said that culture is man's second nature – but would it not be nearer the truth to say that it is his only nature? Man is a symbolical being (animal symbolicum), who finds his way in this world by means of symbols and who perceives reality through these points of reference, which he creates or reproduces. There is no sphere of activity beyond the boundary of this symbolical world. For this reason the perception of human activity cannot go beyond or neglect this all-embracing symbolical universe. Nevertheless far from all historians have mastered the art of reading or deciphering the sign systems of the past or present, since it is by no means easy to learn to read in this manner.

Roymans' article is an original and valuable contribution to an interpretation of the ‘cultural biography’ of the landscape of a specific area by combining archaeological and folkloric evidence. His study concentrates on the sacred places of this landscape, especially the urnfields and barrows, because ‘these are focal points from which local communities order and interpret the surrounding landscape’. The author rightly stresses that funerary monuments not only had a certain significance in the societies that constructed and used them, but that they also had a prominent place in the landscape of later societies up until pre-modern times. He suggests that, in the Meuse-Demer-Scheldt region, there has been ‘a long-term incorporation of prehistorical burial monuments in the mythical landscape of later inhabitants’. Archaeology itself, for that matter, should be understood in the perspective of the (dis)continuing biography of the landscape because it presupposes the destruction of the ancient mythical geography, including the Christian one. Archaeology is the product of the ‘modernisation’ of space: it is presupposing and reflecting (upon) the coming of the modem world with its rationalisation and Entzauberung (disenchantment) of the landscape. In a similar way the study of folklore (Volkskunde in both Dutch and German) has been made possible and interesting by the waning of rural popular culture as a consequence of both the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Thus, it is no accident that modernity produced the conditions of becoming aware of the mythical meaning of the landscape exactly at the time that its traces are disappearing in the physical landscape as well as in the memory of the rural population.

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.

I wish to thank Barbara Bender, Aron Gurevich and Ton Lemaire for reviewing my contribution and for making critical comments on the ideas put forward in it. I should like to take this opportunity to comment briefly on the main points in their reviews.

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.

The study of architecture in relation to the social organization of space is a popular field of research within the discipline of anthropology and other social sciences. In archaeology, it has not played a significant role, although in recent years a number of publications have appeared and clearly the interest of archaeologists in this area of research is growing (Kent 1990; Samson 1990; Richards and Parker Pearson 1994).