Maisières-Canal: An Open-Air Aurignacian Workshop

Miller, Rebecca

doi:10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_1986

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 2 publications

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“…Crvenka-At's main interest is its lowland setting; an outlier in the Carpathian Basin's Aurignacian record. While lowland Aurignacian sites are occasionally encountered elsewhere in Europe (e.g., Masières Canal; Miller, 2014), it has previously been suggested that the occurrence of Aurignacian sites in short stratigraphic sequences in the Carpathian Basins foothills, between 43 and 30 ka BP are a genuine reflection of modern human behavioral preference for this specific biome (Hauck et al, 2018). Our results provide a first direct indication that modern humans made use of riparian landscapes possibly to avoid mountainous regions as a result of late Neanderthal territoriality until c. 39 ka cal BP in the Central Balkans (Alex, 2016, 112;Marín-Arroyo and Mihailović, 2017;Alex et al, 2019;Mihailović, 2020).…”

Section: Archeological and Paleoanthropological Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Early Upper Paleolithic Site Crvenka-At, Serbia–The First Aurignacian Lowland Occupation Site in the Southern Carpathian Basin

Nett

Chu

Fischer³

et al. 2021

Front. Earth Sci.

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The Carpathian Basin is a key region for understanding modern human expansion into western Eurasia during the Late Pleistocene because of numerous early hominid fossil find spots. However, the corresponding archeological record remains less understood due to a paucity of well dated, contextualized sites. To help rectify this, we excavated and sampled Crvenka-At (Serbia), one of the largest Upper Paleolithic sites in the region to obtain radiometric ages for the archeological artifacts and evaluate their depositional context and subsequent site formation processes. Our results confirm that this locality represents a multiple-occupation Aurignacian site that dates to 36.4 ± 2.8 ka based on modeling of luminescence ages. Electrical resistivity tomography measurements indicate that the site formed on a sandy-gravelly fill terrace covered by overbank deposits. Complex grain size distributions further suggest site formation in contrasting depositional environments typically occurring alongside fluvial channels, at lakeshores, in alluvial fan or delta settings. The site is thus the closest (ca. 50 km) known Aurignacian site to the earliest undisputed modern human remains in Europe at the Peştera cu oase and some intervals of the occupation may therefore have been contemporaneous with them. This suggests that modern humans, during their initial settlement of Europe, exploited a wider range of topographic and ecological settings than previously posited. Our findings indicate that lowland areas of the Carpathian Basin are an important part of understanding the early settlement patterns of modern humans in Europe.

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Section: Archeological and Paleoanthropological Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Early Upper Paleolithic Site Crvenka-At, Serbia–The First Aurignacian Lowland Occupation Site in the Southern Carpathian Basin

Nett

Chu

Fischer³

et al. 2021

Front. Earth Sci.

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The unique laurel-leaf points of Volgu document long-distance transport of raw materials in the Solutrean

Koch

Schmidt

2022

Archaeol Anthropol Sci

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The Upper Palaeolithic Solutrean culture that coincided with the last glacial maximum has become famous for documenting an increasing investment of time and effort in the production of tools. However, Solutrean lithic assemblages predominantly document local procurement of flint and only in rare cases, stones were transported over distances above 100 km. The perhaps most remarkable Solutrean artefacts are the large bifacial laurel-leaf points of Volgu. Some studies on the points suggested long-distance transport, proposing multiple raw material locations in the > 170 km distant Paris Basin. These findings were not based on physical or chemical measurements but rather on evaluations of macro- and microscopically visible features at the surface of the flint. In this study, we aim to verify previously made propositions on the Volgu points’ origin with an archaeometric technique. For this, we apply reflectance infrared spectroscopy, a method that relies on identifying differences in the crystallographic properties of flint. We compare eight of the Volgu laurel-leaf points with five regions of Upper Cretaceous flint deposits in France and Belgium. We found that the Volgu points’ flint is most similar to flint from the south-eastern Paris Basin in terms of its crystallography (identifying a region between 170 and 250 km from Volgu). Our findings provide a reproducible line of evidence for the long-distance procurement of flint to produce exceptional artefacts in the Solutrean. Our study is the first application of this method to flint sourcing in a European context. It has therefore also implications for future provenance studies on other archaeological sites in France.

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Maisières-Canal: An Open-Air Aurignacian Workshop

Cited by 2 publications

References 2 publications

The Early Upper Paleolithic Site Crvenka-At, Serbia–The First Aurignacian Lowland Occupation Site in the Southern Carpathian Basin

The Early Upper Paleolithic Site Crvenka-At, Serbia–The First Aurignacian Lowland Occupation Site in the Southern Carpathian Basin

The unique laurel-leaf points of Volgu document long-distance transport of raw materials in the Solutrean

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