Radiocarbon Palaeolithic Europe Database

At the Berlin INQUA 14th Congress (1995) a working group, “European Late Pleistocene Isotopic Stages 2 & 3: Humans, Their Ecology & Cultural Adaptations”, was established by Renault-Miskowsky J, president of the “Comité national français” of the INQUA. One of the objectives was building a database of the human occupation of Europe during this period. The database has been enlarged and now includes Lower, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic sites connecting them to their environmental conditions and the available chronometric dating.

In this database we have collected the available radiometric data from literature and from other databases. We try to incorporate newly published chronometric dates collected from all kinds of available publications. See list of journals inspected in downloadable file “inspected-journals.xlsx”. For colleagues mainly interested in a list of all chronometric dates an excel list (with no details) is available: (Radiocarbon Palaeolithic Europe Database v321 March 2025 extract.xlsx). A file, containing all sites with known coordinates, can be opened for immediate use in Google Earth : “West of 8°E.txt” and “East of 8°.txt”. It will give you the possibility to introduce (by file open) in Google Earth the whole site list in “My Places”.

The database, version 32 (first version was available in 2002), contains now 14277 site forms, most of them with their geographical coordinates, comprising 20665 radiometric data: Conv. 14C and AMS 14C (16413 items), TL (1248 items), OSL (1230 items), ESR, Th/U and AAR (2644 items) from the European (Russian Siberia included) Lower, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic (older than 9500 BP). All dates are conventional dates BP. This improved version 32 replaces the older version 31.

245 new site forms are incorporated and 250 sites have a corrected or an updated content.
The database uses Microsoft Access ©. It can be directly downloaded.

Radiocarbon Palaeolithic Europe Database