Characterizing Ephemeral Paleolithic Occupations at Arma Veirana (Liguria, Italy)

Summary

This paper presents a description of recently studied assemblages from Middle and Upper Paleolithic levels at the site of Arma Veirana, a large cave located in the mountainous hinterland of Liguria. While one Mousterian level shows an intense occupation, all other levels indicate rather short-lived, low intensity occupations. Beyond technological and typological analyses of these assemblages undertaken to characterize them, we also report preliminary data on raw material procurement patterns from these levels. While the Mousterian suggests predominantly local acquisition, the Upper Paleolithic is comprised mainly of exotic lithotypes. Beyond these results which largely agree with received wisdom about the technology and mobility strategies of the two periods, we also discuss the presence of a distinctive reddish radiolarite in some of the assemblages from both periods. This material has historically been considered exotic, raising a number of questions about how local and exotic materials contributed to the toolkits of foragers during their comparatively ephemeral occupations of the site. Lastly, we tackle the question of what these results mean for our understanding of Ligurian prehistory more broadly, since it has almost exclusively focused on coastal as opposed to inland sites.

Cite this Record

Characterizing Ephemeral Paleolithic Occupations at Arma Veirana (Liguria, Italy). Julien Riel-Salvatore, Fabio Negrino, Marco Peresani, Martina Parise, Jamie Hodgkins. Presented at The 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Vancouver, British Columbia. 2017 ( tDAR id: 430972)

Keywords

Geographic Keywords
Europe

Spatial Coverage

min long: -11.074; min lat: 37.44 ; max long: 50.098; max lat: 70.845 ;

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 17260