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3. The Lithic Sample: Nature and Classification Background
- University of Arizona Press
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Background Lithic artifacts from the station amont at La Quina have attracted the attention of professional prehistorians and amateur collectors since the late nineteenth century. Amajor focus of this interest has been on the large and symmetrically retouched racloirs that were present in great numbers in the middle levels of the site. Examples of the industry recovered by Dr. Henri-Martin have found their way into museum collections in almost all parts of the world as a result of his willingness to exchange and share specimens with other prehistorians and then through the further redistribution of those materials over the years by those institutions. The remarkable nature of Dr. HenriMartin ’s collections in the Musée de l’Homme and the Institut de Paléontologie Humaine in Paris led Prof. François Bordes to distinguish a Quina-type Mousterian (Bordes 1961b: 805) as one of four major subdivisions in his classification of Mousterian industries (initially classified as Faciés la Quina [Bordes 1950: 34] and “Charentian” [Bordes 1953b: 460–461]). By the close of the excavations of the Henri-Martins, it was evident that at least three kinds of Mousterian industries, as represented by distinctive retouched tools, were present at the station amont. These included, besides the classic Quina Mousterian in the middle levels, industries from the upper levels characterized by denticulate tools and by bifaces that represented Bordes’ Denticulate Mousterian and Mousterian of Acheulean Tradition. A possible fourth “pre-Mousterian” industry was represented by small numbers of rolled and weathered pieces from the sandy levels at the base of the sequence. The unusual abundance of large flint artifacts at La Quina was a major reason for the exploitation of the site by collectors, and yet, as Dr. Henri-Martin pointed out, there were no obvious sources of flint in the vicinity of the site. This concentration, then, was the result of a purposeful transport by the Mousterians of, in total, enormous quantities of material from distant sources to this particular location. An obvious objective of the research at the site was a better understanding of the motivation for this concentration of lithic artifacts and of the kinds of activities in which they were employed and modified by the Neandertals who brought them there. It was hoped that this understanding might allow further insight into the nature of the Neandertals and their Middle Paleolithic cultures, as well as into the circumstances responsible for the presence of the distinctive industrial assemblages. In order to realize this objective, a major goal of my analysis is to understand the characteristics of the lithic industries in each depositional context as they represent both the deliberate activities of their producers and the effects of the circumstances of their production, use, and abandonment. The procedure here is to examine the global patterns of variability that resulted from the manufacture and utilization of artifacts of the major raw materials and to examine the distinct depositional entities in terms of such aspects as materials used, stages and levels of reduction, and extent of breakage, as well as the more traditional distinctive patterns of flake and implement production. Throughout this analysis it is important to keep two major considerations in mind. The first is that the material recovered is what was left behind at the site, either deliberately or accidentally, by the Neandertals who initially introduced those materials into that context and subsequently modified them. In this sense, it is likely that almost all of the material recovered would have been viewed by the Neandertals as not worth transporting to another locale and the great bulk of it of no further use. The second consideration relates to the restricted portion of the site sampled in our excavation: a thin slice whose width varied from a maximum of about 3 m at the top and bottom of the section, down to less than 20 cm in the later levels of the lower deposits (the locus of Dr. Henri Martin’s moustérien perfectionée). These samples, from a site more than 100 m in breadth, represent very restricted collections of materials that had accumulated in the restricted area excavated but were the partial result of activities that were taking place over much broader areas of the site. One challenge of the analysis is the extent to 3 The Lithic Sample: Nature and Classification The Lithic Sample: Nature and Classification 63 which those events that comprised the successive Neandertal occupations and uses of the site can be recreated with the limited...