Early Middle Pleistocene Flake Production Methods at Nadung'a Site Complex, West Turkana, Kenya

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Middle Pleistocene (0.77-0.13 Ma) was a crucial time in the evolution of the human brain. Homo heidelbergensis cranial fossils and endocasts provide evidence of brain size increases and structural changes during this time, which resulted in brains more like our own. The analysis of Acheulean lithic assemblages provides a means of exploring how these morphological changes affected hominin cognitive abilities. Flake production methods were an important technological component of many Acheulean assemblages, alongside or sometimes to the exclusion of the production of handaxes. Recent studies have established that complex, cognitively demanding Levallois methods, once associated with the Middle Stone Age/Middle Paleolithic, first emerged in the Acheulean. However, studies of Levallois or Levallois-like methods at Acheulean sites are limited to the later Acheulean (0.5-0.13 Ma) or the Victoria West Industry in South Africa. Here we characterize flake production methods at the early Middle Pleistocene (~0.7 Ma) sites of Nadung’a in terms of their productivity, operative complexity, and hierarchy, as well as the level of skill exhibited by the knappers. The Nadung’a sites are compared to the nearby Early Pleistocene site of Nachukui 6 to determine how reduction methods changed through time.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37371.0