SPECIAL ISSUE
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INTRODUCTION
SPECIAL ISSUE Variability of Late Pleistocene and Holocene Microlithic Industries in Northern and Eastern Africa: Recent Interpretations and Perspectives Latifa Sari & Giuseppina Mutri
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
The Last Glacial Maximum has a clear technological imprint in the archaeological record of North Africa and elsewhere. This is in the form of toolkit miniaturization— the advent of the Later Stone Age (LSA) microlithic technologies. These new technologies were associated with a global change towards sophisticated hunting strategies. However, for several decades, microliths (including small retouched/backed tools on flakes and bladelets) were defined and analyzed using a wide range of approaches, which have led to a loss of accuracy in understanding the miniaturization phenomenon. This special issue addresses the question of variability in backed bladelet-based technologies. It also examines the role of LSA microlithic industries as adaptive strategies for coping with paleoenvironmental changes in North Africa. The multidisciplinary research activities conducted in caves and open-air sites in North Africa over the past two decades have highlighted the importance of this region for understanding the development of LSA microlithic technologies in Africa. This special issue, therefore, enriches the debate of origin and the spread of Late Pleistocene microlithic technologies in North Africa and beyond.
L. Sari (*) Centre national de recherches préhistoriques, anthropologiques et historiques (CNRPAH), 3 rue Franklin Roosevelt, Algiers, Algeria e-mail: [email protected] G. Mutri ISMEO (International Association for Mediterranean and Oriental Studies), Roma, Italy e-mail: [email protected]
The articles originated from the session that we coorganized at the 23rd Congress of the Union Internationale des Sciences Préhistoriques et Protohistoriques (UISPP) in Paris (France), June 4–9, 2018 (Fig. 1). The session “Variability of Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Microlithic Industries in Northern Africa: Recent Interpretations and Perspectives” was organized under the auspices of Commission XXIII “Paleolithic landscapes, techniques and cultures of Western North Africa.” What follows are five articles covering a wide geographical area in Northern and Eastern Africa (Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, and Ethiopia) and cutting across the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene periods. The articles present the latest results of research on the evolution of lithic and bone technologies, hunting and hafted technologies, mobility patterns, settlement strategies, and use of territorial space. One of the articles also employs multivariate statistical analyses to understand the variability of backed artifacts in the Late Pleistocene and Holocene microlithic assemblages of the Horn of Africa. The first two articles focus on Late Pleistocene microlithic assemblages, specifically the Iberomaurusian of the Maghreb. These are characterized by the presence of small chipped stone art
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