The 1-million-year-old quartz assemblage from Pont-de-Lavaud (Centre, France) in the European context

The Pont-de-Lavaud site, located in the Centre Region of France (Creuse Valley), yielded a quartzlithic assemblage composed of a few hundred artefacts with cores, pebble tools, flakes and flake-tools, mixed withseveral thousand debris items and pebbles. The archaeological site is covered by a fossil fluvial deposit from theCreuse River (sheet I, with a relative altitude of þ 90/105 m), dated by Electron Spin Resonance at the site itself toaround 1 Ma. We will focus in this paper on the lithic assemblage with clear anthropogenic features to describe thetechnological strategies applied to quartz pebbles, with the help of experiments. The core technology is based onshort ‘cha^nes operatoires’ on local quartz aimed at producing pointed end-products on pebbles and flakes. Themethods and techniques include both the bipolar technique on an anvil and direct percussion with a hard hammer.The reduction sequences were strongly conditioned by the morphology and the physical characteristics of the rawmaterial. Few flakes are retouched. The Pont-de-Lavaud lithic assemblage is one example of the diversity of the 1-Ma European industries. The assemblage shows techno-cultural behavioural variability at this period andadaptation to raw material constraints. Comparisons with series where the use of quartz is widespread demonstratethe ability of hominins to use stones of varying quality and to adapt technology to the raw material in zoneslocated beyond the 45th parallel north.