New investigations on the Protoaurignacian lithic technology of Fumane cave.

The Aurignacian has always been considered an unquestionable cultural proxy for the spread of modern humans from the Levantine corridor to Europe, both for the innovations leading to the increased variety of material culture and modern human remains, especially teeth, found in several Aurignacian cultural layers (Benazzi et al. 2015). Even if in southwestern France the Protoaurignacian is always stratigraphically placed below the Early Aurignacian, new evidence from Central Europe indicates a chronological overlapping between the two assumed consecutive stages (Nigst et al. 2014). From a techno-typological point of view the Protoaurignacian is a blade-bladelet dominated industry. Both products are often described to be obtained from the same cores, through a continual reduction sequence (Bon 2002). Among tools, retouched bladelets are the most attested type, followed by end-scrapers, burins and retouched blades. The Early Aurignacian is instead known for the use of two distinct core reduction sequences that result in the production of blades and bladelets. This difference, proposed in order to offer a more appropriate separation between the two techno-complexes, has blurred the variability of methods and technical expedients that were available to those human groups. In this poster we will present the first result of an accurate analysis of the lithic industry found in the Protoaurignacian layers of a key site for the understanding of the earliest Aurignacian: Fumane cave. In layers A2-A1 dwelling structures, lithic assemblages, bone and antler tools, painted stones, and ornamental objects mark the arrival of the first Aurignacians after 41.2 – 40.4 ky cal BP (Higham et al. 2009). The present study considers several thousands of blanks, by-products, retouched tools and cores: this latter category is composed of around 200 artifacts. To describe the material, a combination of two main methods is used: attribute analysis and reduction sequence approach. Cores received special attention in the first part of our research project. Each core was described individually to reconstruct the last steps (position, chronology and direction) of the reduction sequence prior to discard, following Roussel et al. (2016). Preliminary observations were then tested on the material using the body of data obtained through the attribute analysis. Protoaurignacian lithic production at Fumane cave is specialized to the manufacture of retouched bladelets and retouched points (around 80% of the retouched tools). Cores appear always highly exhausted and the last scars show that the main target of the blank production are convergent and slightly curved bladelets. The almost absence of veritable blade cores (only 3 specimens), the dimension of the complete blades and the original dimension of raw material nodules, suggest that the production of blade and bladelets are in most cases integrated, but not exclusively successive, as argued by F. Bon (2002). In most cases long and large blades come from the first stage of core structure preparation (semi-cortical blades, lateral blades and overshot blades). After this stage, small blades and big bladelets were produced in the same reduction phase, during an alternate process. Furthermore, an exclusive bladelets production is well attested. Many of those bladelet cores, mainly produced on small blocks and sometimes slabs, have two or more flaking surfaces, used in succession to optimize the production. Their discard is almost always due to the reflection of the last negatives, due to the flattening of the flaking surface. The ongoing analyses at Fumane cave reveal that the concept of the Protoaurignacian is still not very well stated from a technological point of view and that the vast geographic area covered by this techno-complex could be characterized by a greater variability, which in our opinion has been minimized to easily track the spread of modern humans across Western Eurasia at the threshold of the Upper Paleolithic.