Archaeology, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia 51 (2) 2023   doi:10.17746/1563-0110.2023.51.2.014-026

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The Emergence of Levallois Blade Industry
in the Western Foothills of Tien Shan:
Kulbulak Layer 24

G.D. Pavlenok¹, S.A. Kogai¹, R.N. Kurbanov², G.A. Mukhtarov³, and K.K. Pavlenok¹

¹Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences, Pr. Akademika Lavrentieva 17, Novosibirsk, 630090, Russia

²Lomonosov Moscow State University, Leninskie Gory 1, Moscow, 119991, Russia

³National Center of Archaeology, Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan, Pr. Mirzo Ulugbeka 81, Tashkent, 100170, Uzbekistan

We describe finds from layer 24 of Kulbulak, Western Tien Shan, excavated in 2018-2019. On the basis of the age of layer 16 (MIS 5e) and the geological context of the deposits, the profile of the site was subdivided into paleogeographic stages. Layers 25-22 likely correlate with the warming period in the second half of MIS 7. Primary reduction in layer 24 industry was based on parallel uni- and bidirectional techniques, with wide and narrow-faced cores, and following the Levallois strategy. Tools include various side-scrapers, a point on a heavily retouched blade, a retouched blade, an atypical angular end-scraper, and blanks of bifaces. Parallels are found between those finds and contemporaneous industries of the Near East. Technologically and likely chronologically, layer 24 is intermediate between Late Amudian and Early Middle Paleolithic assemblages of the Tabun D stage. This is evidenced by a combination of non-Levallois and Levallois flaking (the latter being predominant), by different types of blanks within the same reduction sequence, by a high share of blades among blanks, by bifacial pieces, by an elongated heavily retouched point, and by an atypical end-scraper.

Keywords: Lithic industry, primary reduction, toolkit, scar pattern analysis, Middle Paleolithic, MIS 7, Western Tien Shan