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

Abstract

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.

The origin of chert in the Aurignacian of Vogelherd Cave investigated by infrared spectroscopy

“…Spectral acquisition was repeated and averaged 160 times and the resolution was set to 8 cm -1 on the instrument. These reflectance spectra display quartz lattice bands that can be assigned to several stretching modes [ 48 , 49 ] of the chert’s quartz crystals. Band shape is influenced by optical phenomena occurring in these crystals (for an example see: [ 50 ]).…”

“…This promises to yield information on differences in band parameters and shapes which in turn, is expected to reflect crystallographic factors, such as weak OH-bands and other hydrogen-related impurities [ 53 , but see also: 54 ]. Similarities and dissimilarities between samples, as observed from the variance in PCA plots, can therefore be related to the sample’s mineralogical composition and variations in quartz crystallography In a second step we conducted linear discriminant analysis (LDA) with our archaeological samples included but without assigning them to groups [ 49 ]. To validate our dataset of the LDA, we performed accuracy assessment test on the three raw material groups.…”

Preference for Porphyry: Petrographic Insights into Lithic Raw Material Procurement from Palaeolithic Kazakhstan

“…The sign of elongation is determined on the basis of whether the slow and fast component is vibrating in the longest direction of the crystal (Miehe, Graetsch, and Flörke 1984). A recent paper by Koch and Schmidt (2022) graphically represents the length-fast and length-slow chalcedony types. The identification of chalcedony types is an important parameter that helps to provenance chert.…”

“…Nevertheless, the question of the characterization, provenance, and transport distance of the exogenous raw materials from these sites remains open and requires a comprehensive multidisciplinary approach employing a variety of analytical tools. Examples of long-distance transport of higher quality raw materials such as micro-and cryptocrystalline varieties of silica rocks are known in the Palaeolithic industries of Europe, Africa, and across the Asian continent (Binford 1980;Feblot-Augustins 1993Bar-Yosef 2002;Sano 2010;Arrizabalaga et al 2014;Tomasso and Porraz 2016;Ekshtain et al 2017;Frahm and Hauck 2017;Caruana, Tasker, and Stratford 2019;Khatsenovich et al 2020;Koch and Schmidt 2022). This led to the growth of raw material provenance studies (Brandl 2016), which, in turn, became an interpretive tool to investigate hominin raw material selection behaviors (McBrearty and Brooks 2000;Wadley 2013), population movements (Feblot-Augustins 2009, and human-environment interactions (Bar-Yosef 2002;Blinkhorn and Petraglia 2017;Ghasidian and Heydari-Guran 2018;Heydari-Guran and Ghasidian 2020).…”