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Authors
Abstract(s)
The Acheulean Palaeolithic period is a long-lasted cultural period in human prehistory and
history. It persevered for almost 1.5 Ma, demonstrating a crucial timing of human evolution
and development in prehistory. Unequivocally, it was the period of diversification of aspects
of humanity, i.e., geography, technology, socio-economic, etcetera, and morphological
configuration of major prehistoric human groups, i.e., Homo erectus, Anatomically Modern
Humans and Homo neanderthalensis. The Acheulean has appeared all over the Old World and
was distinctively characterized technologically, chronologically, and in occurrence. European
Acheulean mainly appeared during the late period, characterized by assemblages with bifaces
and, on the other hand, small to medium-sized flakes without bifaces.
Most assemblages with the Late Acheulean bifaces in Europe have been tentatively
characterized to have standard features, and some have cooccurred with the advanced
succeeding lithic industry. The Guado San Nicola archaeological site in South-central Italy is
among the well-known palaeolithic sites in Europe, presenting lithic technological shifts from
Lower Palaeolithic to Middle Palaeolithic. This work is dedicated to investigating the
association of Acheulean bifaces during transitional periods in terms of functional, technology
and site formation factors on an assemblage scale.
Through use-wear analysis methodologies, Low and High-Powered approaches, this work has
managed to identify a significant hominid activity associated with bifaces at Guado San Nicola
to be carcasses processing. Nonetheless, given the small sample size analyzed for this research,
the results are immensely supported by comparative analysis from related studies and
previously reported analysis results of the same assemblage, such as zooarchaeological,
paleontological, geological and archaeological results. Technologically and morphologically,
v
the bifaces assemblage at Guado San Nicola presents major common traits of such aspects in
the European Late Acheulean bifaces.
Description
Keywords
Acheulean Bifaces Guado San Nicola Use-Wear analysis The Lower to middle paleolithic transition