Lake Mungo and Willandra
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LA MICOQUE Christopher E. Miller Institute for Archaeological Sciences, Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany La Micoque is a Paleolithic site located in the Dordogne region of southwestern France. The site is well known for its Acheulian and particularly its Middle Paleolithic artifacts. The site lends its name to the Micoquian industry of stone tools. Situated along the left bank of the Manaurie valley, 500 m from its confluence with the Vézère River, La Micoque sits below a cliff of Coniacian limestone (Late Cretaceous). The site was first discovered in 1895 by the landowner and subsequently excavated by Chauvet and Rivière in 1896, Capitan in 1896, Harlé in 1897, Peyrony in 1898 and 1929–1932, Coutil in 1903–1905, Cartailhac in 1905, and Hauser in 1906–1907. Bordes excavated the site in 1956, and it was most recently investigated by Debénath and Rigaud between 1983 and 1996. The lowest cultural layers contain the transition from Acheulian to Mousterian industries (the so-called Tayacian), which has been dated by Electron Spin Resonance (ESR) on horse teeth to between 241 15 and 288 10 ka (Schwarcz and Grün, 1988). The site also contains small, elongated, bifacially worked hand axes, known as Micoquian-type hand axes, in addition to scrapers with quina retouch and Mousterian points. Capitan and Hauser were the first excavators to describe the stratigraphy (Capitan, 1896); however, the stratigraphic system of Peyrony, first established in 1933, has become the standard for the site (Peyrony, 1938). He defined several horizontal layers, starting with
A at the base and finishing with M at the top. He identified layers with angular limestone clasts as e´boulis (rock scree or talus) and layers with rounded cobbles as having a fluvial origin. Breuil (1938) criticized Peyrony’s interpretation of the rounded cobbles and suggested that their rounding was a result of cryoclastism related to cryoturbation and solifluction. Bordes, Laville, and Rigaud adopted this interpretation and suggested that the deposits formed within a rock-shelter, whose roof no longer exists (Laville, 1973, 197–226). La Micoque became a key site for the development of Laville’s climatostratigraphic synthesis of cave and rock-shelter sequences in southwestern France. At La Micoque and other sites, he interpreted the e´boulis layers as representing cold, glacial periods and the reddish sandy-clay layers as representing in situ formation of soils during interstadials and interglacials. Texier, in a recent reassessment of site formation processes at La Micoque (2009), questions most of the previous interpretations. Like Peyrony, he argues, based on sedimentological data, that the majority of the site was formed by fluvial action, as indicated by rounded grains and cobbles, graded bedding, and crossstratification. Some diamictic layers, formed by colluvation, originated from the limestone cliff backing the site. Taken together, the geoarchaeological evidence strongly suggests that La M
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