Two long-standing issues in archaeology have been preservation and selection biases - caves especially offer rich sources of both. They are ideal conditions to have preserved artifacts, and are easy to find. So historically, our research has always presented a very cave-centered portrait of Paleolithic life, one in which people in the Paleolithic seemed to just land in cave sites, and then suddenly showed up at some other site. Archaeologists acknowledged that these people obtained their food from out in the open and that they did not live in the caves year-round, but they also seemed to think that activity wasn't going to be interesting or archaeologically fruitful. Yet in the early 1970s, American archaeologists were using a new open-air method of surveying the outside landscape for archaeological artifacts. This method hadn't yet been used in Europe, so Conkey suggested a new project in which they would be looking for materials - for Paleolithic research, stone tools - out on the landscape as opposed to within caves. “They said, “You won’t find anything.” I said, “Why won’t I find anything?” They said, “Nobody’s really found anything or reported anything.” I said, “Has anybody looked systematically?” They said, “Well, no.” They thought I was nuts.” - Margaret Conkey Yet, evidence does exists that Paleolithic people spent less time in caves than we imagined in the past. For example, seasonal occupation evidence can sometimes be inferred from animal bones. Looking at found animal teeth, it can be, archaeologists can tell at what season of the year the animals were killed. Other animals are only available at certain times of the year - like fish who spawn in certain seasons. Overall, it's clear that people were in caves for maybe a couple of months a year at the most, and almost all of these caves are described by archaeologists as seasonal (occupied in the autumn or winter months). So Conkey and her teams did what had been ignored for a century; they looked at the lives Paleolithic people carried out in between the cave sites in France. Before 1993, no survey had ever been done on this.