This is sometimes called the "Age of Reindeer" because such an enormous proportion of the diet seems to have consisted of reindeer meat, and reindeer seem to have been so much at the center of life as almost to be herded rather than hunted. (The term "Age of Reindeer" is sometimes extended to the whole of the European Upper Paleolithic.)
The stone artifacts left to us from this period include very small blades, apparently mounted together to make composite implements, as well as burins, scrapers, and various devices to punch holes, collectively referred to as awls.
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| Among the oddest artifacts from Magdalenian settlements are short clubs, always with a hole at one end, traditionally but probably wrongly called bâtons de commandement (scepters). One hypothesis is that they were basically wrench-like tools for straightening arrows, with decoration suggesting a possible derivative symbolic use for decorated ones. |
Enormous amounts of bone remain from this period, including spears, atlatls, harpoons (with different sorts of barbs) and so on. Prominent also are small, carved works of art. Earliest phases seem to occur only in France, but by late Magdalenian times, this inventory of materials is found all across north central Europe.
Most of the most impressive works of cave art are from the Magdalenian, prominently including Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain, and monumental mural art was long considered to have been developed in the Magdalenian context. However the extremely similar site of Chauvet (France) is reliably dated to the Aurignacian, over ten thousand years earlier, so the uniqueness of Magdalenian wall art is no longer claimed. To the extent that wall art was taken as a measure of increasing cognitive capacity over the course of the Upper Paleolithic, that argument must now be discarded in favor of a view which sees modern human competence beginning, rather abruptly, at the beginning of the Aurignacian period.