Abstract
Identifying the sources of origin of lithic raw materials is crucial for addressing hominid mobility patterns and adaptations in the Paleolithic. Among the raw materials exploited in the past, the most commonly used lithic raw material in the Palaeolithic of Europe and the Caucasus was chert (flint). With few exclusions, Eastern-European archaeology lacks a complex systematic study of raw material strategies, including surveying and sampling chert (flint) sources, serial geochemical and petrographic analyses of samples from sources and Middle Palaeolithic sites. The authors report results of geochemical analyses of chert (flint) sources, discovered and sampled in the North-Western Caucasus, which were studied using several methods. XRF analysis has been performed on 98 geological samples from chert outcrops, including samples from 9 different chert-bearing geological strata from 21 outcrops in the region. Additionally, scanning electron microscopy was performed on 15 samples from these outcrops and 23 chert artifacts by SEM and nine samples by XRF from Middle Palaeolithic sites in the region, including Mezmaiskaya cave, Hadjoh-2, and Besleneevskaya open-air sites, dated from 70k–80k to 40k BP were studied.
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Acknowledgements
The research was funded by grant No. 20-18-00060, “Trends of the cultural process during the Late Pleistocene in the North-Western Caucasus,” from the Russian Science Foundation. We want to thank the anonymous reviewer, whose comments helped us to improve the manuscript.
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Doronicheva, E.V., Kulkova, M.A., Tselmovitch, V.A. (2023). Geochemical Data on the North-Western Caucasus Chert Sources and Origin of the Middle Palaeolithic Artifacts. In: Ankusheva, N.N., Chechushkov, I.V., Epimakhov, A.V., Ankushev, M.N., Ankusheva, P.S. (eds) Geoarchaeology and Archaeological Mineralogy—2021. Springer Proceedings in Earth and Environmental Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16544-3_10
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