Emergence of regional cultural traditions during the Lower Palaeolithic: the case of Frosinone-Ceprano basin (Central Italy) at the MIS 11–10 transition

Résumé En

Decades of fieldwork in the Frosinone-Ceprano basin (Latin Valley, Latium, central Italy) have shed light on numerous open-air Lower Palaeolithic localities, delivering a human fossil calvarium, thousands of scattered faunal remains and a large collection of lithic industries, including core-and-flake type lithic series (Mode 1) and Acheulean assemblages (Mode 2). The continuously growing number of available geochronological data (obtained by 40Ar/39Ar on volcanic minerals, ESR/U-series on large mammal teeth and ESR on bleached fluvial quartz) allow today the construction of a reliable and precise chronological framework for the Lower Palaeolithic sites of this area of the Latin valley. The archaeological horizons with bifaces all appear to belong to a relatively short Middle Pleistocene time range, between about 410 and 350 ka, coeval to the end of the interglacial MIS 11 and to the beginning of the following glacial MIS 10.The Acheulean tools are often associated with cores and flakes. Bifaces are mainly made on limestone, secondary flint and quartz. The archaeological corpus also yielded tools on fragments of large herbivore bones. Comparisons between technological strategies and paleo-anthropological data at the global scale are now meaningful and enable us to decipher hominin behaviour at a more regional scale. Such careful work is becoming essential in the frame of the recent discoveries showing that the MIS 11-10 period was a pivotal period characterized by the appearance of several new archaeological features later associated with the Neanderthal lineage in Western Europe. We present here the first in-depth technological study of the Acheulean lithic corpus from the major archaeological sites from the Frosinone-Ceprano basin including the Campogrande localities (CG9 and CG10, intermediate and upper levels), Colle Avarone, Selvotta, Isoletta (level 4), Lademagne (upper and lower levels) and Masseria Castellone.