Les assemblages lithiques du Middle Stone Age Nord-Africain : Productions, produits et évolution

Le résumé fourni par la source

At the end of the Middle Pleistocene, in North Africa, cultural complexes have co-existed. The identification and definition of these techno-complexes have been debated for more than a century. One of the important issues of Paleolithic research in North Africa is the understanding of the relationship between the North African Middle Stone Age and Aterian industries. For this reason, precise definitions of these complexes are essential.Typo-technological approaches to lithic equipment have allowed for the enrichment of the definition of the Aterian and North African Early Middle Stone Age complexes - notably by the detail of the attributes constituting their definitions (i.e. blades industries, miniaturization and micro-flakes industries, tooling, etc.).The corpus studied comes from the sequences of three sites: the Bizmoune Cave, Rhafas, and Taforalt. The combined archaeostratigraphic sequences cover a period of 100,000 years, from the end of the Middle Pleistocene to the beginning of the Late Pleistocene. This study proposes a chronological and spatial gradient of two globalizing cultural entities: 1/ the Early North African Middle Stone Age is represented from the beginning of MIS6, or even SIM8 on the Atlantic coast and will last until MIS5 in the occidental part of North Africa; 2/ the Aterian is represented from the end of MIS6 in the Atlantic westcoast of Morocco. Its representation is uniform in the Maghreb in MIS5 and replaces the Early NAMSA techno-complex.Moreover, the Aterian is not a homogeneous technical entity. The assemblages show a multitude of technical solutions highlighting the presence of plural entities. These results show the importance of the methodological choice of the typo-technological approaches. They show moreover that this space is dynamic, connected by flows of humans, carriers of ideas.

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