Raw material discernment and technological aspects of the Barranco León and Fuente Nueva 3 stone assemblages (Orce southern Spain)
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2010
- handle: 10670/1.8dtaas
- hal: hal-00509002
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Deborah Barsky et al., « Raw material discernment and technological aspects of the Barranco León and Fuente Nueva 3 stone assemblages (Orce southern Spain) », HAL-SHS : archéologie, ID : 10670/1.8dtaas
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Lithics from Barranco León and Fuente Nueva 3 in Orce, Spain (respectively 1.3 and 1.2 Ma according to paleomagnetic and biochronological criteria) provide information about the oldest known European Mode 1 assemblages. At these sites, both located in what were swampy areas close to the eastern shores of the Baza paleo-lake, evidence points towards competition between hominins and hyenas to access large herbivore carcasses abandoned by other carnivores. To make their tools, hominins collected rocks available nearby such as limestone and flint. Distinctive groupings of rock type with typo-technological elements are clear: flint was largely exploited for flake production whereas limestone was reserved for percussion instruments and worked cobbles. These Spanish sites do not comprise true configured tools. Knapping strategies were adapted to raw material constraints and initial block form; the hard hammer on an anvil technique was frequently used to reduce small, cube-shaped flint matrixes and some larger limestone pieces. Technical systems were mainly unidirectional recurrent, although polyhedron shaped multiplatform cores were also produced by hard hammer technique. While evidence from the Near East attests to the presence of Mode 2 producing populations as early as 1.4 Ma, such assemblages do not appear in Europe until around 0.7 Ma. Given data from the Orce assemblages, how might the earliest hominin occupations of Europe be interpreted?