Ultimately, she hopes that this will help them better understand the social geography and landscapes of Paleolithic art. It is also a project about fundamental archaeological survey, about survey methods, and about distributional archaeology. She heads crews of varying size and doing varied intensity of survey, surveying the landscape, searching for traces of the day-to-day lives of the cave painters. Since 2006, her international team has carried out excavation of the region's first open-air site, and has uncovered more than 3000 identifiable lithic artifacts, some dating back to the Paleolithic era and distributed within a 260 square kilometer transect. This was carried out using two grants from the National Science Foundation, one from the France-Berkeley Fund, and several from the Stahl Endowment of UC Berkeley, Archaeological Research Facility. The NSF still has this program which funds high-risk projects, and allows people to undertake new and unprecedented projects with a funding source. It was a small grant - $25,000-$30,000 - for which Conkey had to develop relationships with French colleagues, as well as get permission from the regional archaeological service, and a permit.