Arzarello, MartaBerruti, Gabriele Luigi FrancescoKisena, Felix Devis2024-01-202024-01-2020222022http://hdl.handle.net/10400.26/49171The 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.engAcheuleanBifacesGuado San NicolaUse-Wear analysisThe Lower to middle paleolithic transitionmaster thesis203199421