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Emergence of regional cultural traditions during the Lower Palaeolithic: the case of Frosinone-Ceprano basin (Central Italy) at the MIS 11–10 transition

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Abstract

Decades of fieldwork in the Frosinone-Ceprano basin (Latin Valley, Latium, central Italy) have shed light on numerous open-air Lower Palaeolithic localities, delivering a human fossil calvarium, thousands of scattered faunal remains and a large collection of lithic industries, including core-and-flake type lithic series (mode 1) and Acheulean assemblages (mode 2). The continuously growing number of available geochronological data (obtained by 40Ar/39Ar on volcanic minerals, ESR/U-series on large mammal teeth and ESR on bleached fluvial quartz) allow today the construction of a reliable and precise chronological framework for the Lower Palaeolithic sites of this area of the Latin Valley. The archaeological horizons with bifaces all appear to belong to a relatively short Middle Pleistocene time range, between about 410 and 350 ka, coeval to the end of the interglacial MIS 11 and to the beginning of the following glacial MIS 10. The Acheulean tools are often associated with cores and flakes. Bifaces are mainly made on limestone, secondary flint and quartz. The archaeological corpus also yielded tools on fragments of large herbivore bones. Comparisons between technological strategies and palaeo-anthropological data at the global scale are now meaningful and enable us to decipher hominin behaviour at a more regional scale. Such careful work is becoming essential in the frame of the recent discoveries showing that the MIS 11–10 period was a pivotal period characterized by the appearance of several new archaeological features later associated with the Neanderthal lineage in Western Europe. We present here the first in-depth technological study of the Acheulean lithic corpus from the major archaeological sites from the Frosinone-Ceprano basin including the Campogrande localities (CG9 and CG10, intermediate and upper levels), Colle Avarone, Selvotta, Isoletta (level 4), Lademagne (upper and lower levels) and Masseria Castellone. For this work, we focus on biface shaping strategies and demonstrate technological features suggesting the existence of networks connecting the different human occupation sites. Technological data are compared with other penecontemporaneous Italian sites to discuss the hypotheses and characteristics of such early evidence of regionalization in Europe in this specific area of Central Italy. It seems to indicate that glacial conditions characterized by millennial rapid climatic oscillations could have been favourable to the development of specific vegetation propitious to human settlement in South-western Europe. European vegetation, as it drives the biomass availability for large herbivores, seems hence to have played a crucial role in the mobility and settlement of human groups.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been presented at the USIPP congress 2018 Paris in the session “MIS 13-11: a major transformation in the European Lower Palaeolithic” organized by James Cole and Rob Hosfield. The text has been edited by Louise Byrne, English native speaker and official translator. We would like to thank the two reviewers and the editor for their comments, which helped us to deeply enhance the manuscript.

Funding

The analyses of the lithic series were financially supported by funding from the National Museum of Natural History (Paris, France) (Action Transversale du Museum, “Acheulean in volcanic areas in Italy”). Surveys were performed by I. Biddittu et al. The excavations and palaeoenvironmental analyses at Campogrande were performed within the framework of the project “The Ceprano calvarium and its environment”, with financial backing from various grants attributed to one of us (G.M.), by the Sapienza University of Rome.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. UMR 7194 HNHP, CNRS-MNHN-UPVD, Department « Homme et environnement », National Museum of Natural History, Institut de Paléontologie Humaine, 1 rue René Panhard, Paris, France

    Marie-Hélène Moncel, Pierre Voinchet & Jean-Jacques Bahain

  2. Istituto Italiano di Paleontologia Umana, Via Ulisse Aldrovandi 18, Rome, Italy

    Italo Biddittu, Giorgio Manzi & Barbara Saracino

  3. Dipartimento di Biologia Ambientale, Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome, Italy

    Giorgio Manzi

  4. École française de Rome, Piazza Farnese, Rome, Italy

    Alison Pereira

  5. LSCE, UMR 8212 CEA Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Sébastien Nomade

  6. Senckenberg Forschungsinstitut, Frankfurt/Main, Germany

    Christine Hertler

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  1. Marie-Hélène Moncel
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Correspondence to Marie-Hélène Moncel.

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Moncel, MH., Biddittu, I., Manzi, G. et al. Emergence of regional cultural traditions during the Lower Palaeolithic: the case of Frosinone-Ceprano basin (Central Italy) at the MIS 11–10 transition. Archaeol Anthropol Sci 12, 185 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-020-01150-x

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