Middle East Archaeology: Sites, Texts, Symbols, and Politics
- PDF / 20,556,793 Bytes
- 556 Pages / 504.567 x 720 pts Page_size
- 4 Downloads / 206 Views
Maastricht-Belve´de`re: Interpretation Roebroeks et al. 1992; De Loecker 2006). Yet, of a Technological Paleo-Surface some data suggest that considerable time, energy Dimitri De Loecker Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
and skill was invested at certain localities, in order to execute specific technology or food related maintenance and production tasks (De Loecker & Roebroeks 2012).
Introduction
Definition
Since hominins started producing stone artifacts approximately 2.6 Ma ago (Semaw et al. 2003), millions of kilos of lithic artifacts must have been discarded on the world’s surfaces. Most of that output survived in reworked contexts, on surfaces, and in lag deposits, abraded by transport and reworked from one sedimentary matrix into another. However, some of that lithic material became encased in sediments soon after primary deposition and is recoverable in its (near) original spatial patterning. A good example is MaastrichtBelve´de`re in the Netherlands. At this commercially exploited quarry, a complex of primary context sites from the early Middle Paleolithic has been excavated from fine-grained fluvial sediments since the 1980s (Roebroeks 1988; De Loecker 2006). The local deposits contained fully temperate faunas and could probably be attributed to the late Middle Pleistocene (MIS 7, see below). The material evidence generally seems to reflect very mobile, episodic, and short-term Neanderthal occupations of parts of the river Maas (Meuse) valley, at least 250,000 years ago (e.g., Roebroeks 1988;
What follows is a brief summary of the local Pleistocene archaeology, focusing on the high residential mobility character of Early Neanderthals (Binford 1980). Data from more recent Maastricht-Belve´de`re studies is concisely integrated to illustrate the complexity of the artifact distributions. It will be argued that we are not dealing here with a “hit-and-run” record only.
Key Issues/Current Debates/Future Directions/Examples The Maastricht-Belve´de`re Setting The former Maastricht-Belve´de`re loess and gravel pit is located on the left bank of the river Maas, approximately 1 km north-northwest of the Dutch town of Maastricht (50 520 09.4000 N, 5 400 27.3300 E, Fig. 1). Extensive fieldwork has focused on an interdisciplinary study of flint distributions, which occasionally were associated with faunal remains. Artifact scatters and patches (Isaac 1981) were generally preserved in primary archaeological context, in fine-grained sediments
C. Smith (ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2, # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
M
4576
Maastricht-Belve´de`re: Interpretation of a Technological Paleo-Surface
loess stratigraphy and the mammal and mollusc biostratigraphical evidence indicate an age before the next-to-last glacial, i.e., prior to MIS 6 (van Kolfschoten et al. 1993). Thermoluminescence dating of heated flint artifacts yielded an age of 250 20 ka (Huxtable 1993), and electron spin resonance dating of shells gave an age of 2
Data Loading...
