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Late Middle Paleolithic Technological Organization and Behavior at the Open-Air Site of Barozh 12 (Armenia)

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Abstract

Barozh 12 is a late Middle Paleolithic open-air locality in western Armenia dating from ~ 60,000 to 31,000 years ago. Stratified deposits with high densities of obsidian artifacts permit the analysis of diachronic trends in manufacture, reduction, discard, and toolstone provisioning as related to technological organization in the context of hunter-gatherer mobility and land use. Throughout much of Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 3, the occupants of Barozh 12 employed consistent unidirectional-convergent and unidirectional Levallois and “para-Levallois” core reduction techniques. Site occupation intensity varied over time, with changing emphasis on local core reduction and tool discard. Obsidian artifact sourcing indicates predominantly local toolstone exploitation, while blanks bearing retouch were intermittently transported to Barozh 12 over distances up to ~ 190 linear km. As a repeatedly visited, persistent place in regional settlement systems, this site records a range of mobility strategies and differential use of diverse eco-geographic zones. This study—a detailed analysis of late Middle Paleolithic technological organization at an open-air site in the Armenian highlands—broadens the regional record of Late Pleistocene hominin technological behaviors and settlement dynamics during a crucial period of human evolution.

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Notes

  1. For further detail, readers are referred to Glauberman et al. 2020: Appendix A.

  2. Split cobble cores can also be considered a form of cores on flakes.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Armenia, Pavel Avetisyan, the director of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia, and Khachatur Meliksetyan, Director of the Institute of Geological Sciences of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia, for their long-standing assistance and support. We are also grateful to the University of Connecticut, Department of Anthropology, and the Middle East Technical University Settlement Archaeology Program. The artifact cleaning procedure was implemented at the Hydrogeochemical Laboratory of the Institute of Geological Sciences of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia by Dr. Shushanik Zakaryan and Dr. Shushanik Gyulnazaryan. We acknowledge Sambat Davtyan and Vahe Davtyan for the topographic mapping, Garik Prevyan for artifact illustrations, and Razmik Asatryan for field logistics. We thank Beverly Schmidt-McGee for assistance with artifact data analysis software, and Ariel Malinsky-Buller and Corey L. Johnson for their comments on the previous versions of this manuscript. This research would not have been possible without the participation of Hovik Partevyan and the Partevyan family, Suren Kesejyan, Artur Petrosyan, and Robert Ghukasyan. We kindly thank the mayor and residents of the village of Barozh for their permission to survey and excavate in their pasturelands. We are grateful to the editors, anonymous reviewers, and Charles Egeland for their comments on this paper, which greatly improved it. This paper is dedicated to the memories of Prof. Harold Dibble and Prof. Ofer Bar-Yosef. Following their enthusiastic guidance, we aim to continue to conduct internationally collaborative, multidisciplinary Paleolithic archeology in our research area.

Funding

This research is funded by an EC 7th Framework Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship (PLATEAU no. 330301) and the Gfoeller Renaissance Foundation (USA).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia, Yerevan, Armenia

    Phil Glauberman, Boris Gasparyan & Hayk Haydosyan

  2. School of Humanities and Social Sciences Cluster, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China

    Phil Glauberman

  3. Department of Archaeology, Anthropology and Geography, University of Winchester, Winchester, UK

    Keith Wilkinson

  4. Council on Archaeological Studies, Department of Anthropology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Ellery Frahm

  5. Department of Cartography and Geomorphology, Yerevan State University, Yerevan, Armenia

    Samvel Nahapetyan

  6. Institute of Geological Sciences of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia, Yerevan, Armenia

    Dmitri Arakelyan

  7. Human Origins Group, Faculty of Archaeology, University of Leiden, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Yannick Raczynski-Henk

  8. Department of Anthropology, Old World Archaeology Program, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

    Daniel S. Adler

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Glauberman, P., Gasparyan, B., Wilkinson, K. et al. Late Middle Paleolithic Technological Organization and Behavior at the Open-Air Site of Barozh 12 (Armenia). J Paleo Arch 3, 1095–1148 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41982-020-00071-4

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