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Lithic scatters are the most abundant class of evidence relating to Late Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic activity in southern Britain. Many such scatters, especially those from surface and ploughsoil contexts, have long been characterised as being of low-interpretive value and have been marginalised both in academic studies of the periods and in the wider context of protecting and managing the historic environment. This vast body of evidence makes little contribution to contemporary understandings of the LUP and Mesolithic, which remains largely informed by work which privileges the investigation of well-preserved sites with in situ lithic scatters, especially those with associated faunal remains and palaeoenvironmental evidence. This has serious implications for our ability to characterise and interpret activity in locations and regions where such well preserved and intensively investigated sites are lacking, and in many areas of the country policy makers, fieldworkers and curators are not equipped with the information necessary to make informed decisions concerning the investigation, management and protection of the archaeology of these periods. This thesis explicitly address these issues through a detailed case study of the lithic scatter record from a study area in eastern England. This study is based around a comprehensive database of reported lithic scatters, assembled from a wide range of published and unpublished sources and encompassing all kinds of scatters, from well preserved and exhaustively analysed in-situ scatters to poorly provenanced collections of lithics amassed in the late 19th and early 20th century. This thesis provides the first comprehensive synthesis of the Late Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic of the study area and explicitly assesses the interpretative potential of the lithic scatter record, in terms of how it can be used both to develop narratives of landscape occupation and to inform future work on, and management of, lithic scatters in the study area and beyond.

No / This paper introduces a method to study the degree of change that affected a prehistoric context as the result of environmental processes. It is based on the direct examination of a representative sample of stone tool by-products, and on the identification of all surface alteration features. We summarize the theoretical bases for the formation of some wear features and the main results of a number of experiments involving interaction between chert flakes and sediments. Experimental results include: (1) the wear rate of flakes is not constant; (2) the wear rate increases as the size of the grains that compose the matrix increases; (3) fine grained chert resists wear better then coarse grained chert; and (4) the presence of moisture will trigger some chemical reactions that promote wear and the formation of films on chert surfaces. We apply these findings to the cave site of Grotta di Pozzo, Italy, and conclude that, strictly within the area sampled, there is low degree of disturbance and low intensity of chemical processes that may, however, confound the reconstruction of human activities in this part of the cave.

This thesis describes the experimental work carried out as part of the Learning to be Human Project, investigating skill and learning in early flaked stone technologies. A group of 16 volunteers were studied as they learnt skills in Oldowan style flaking, Acheulean handaxe technology and Levallois preferential flake technologies. Aptitude, practice hours and hours spent in taught sessions were recorded and skill in each of these technologies was assessed at regular intervals. This information was used to answer questions concerning the acquisition of high level skill in these technologies, the role of practice, teaching and aptitude in determining skill in terms of connaissance and savoir-faire and the archaeological visibility of skill. At a more in depth level the significance of these findings for cognitive capacities of early hominins and the evolution of modern human brains and intelligence was assessed. The results of these experiments allowed the identification of the greater impact of teaching on Acheulean handaxe and Levallois technology compared to Oldowan style flaking. Technologically focussed teaching was shown to be essential for achieving high level skill in handaxe technology while all knapping contributed to the skill achieved in Oldowan style flaking and Levallois technology. In terms of aptitude, previous craft experience and contact with flaked stone assemblages most affected skill achieved in handaxe and Oldowan technologies while spatial ability best determined skill in Levallois. The findings of the connaissance and savoir-faire analysis have indicated that the differences seen between Oldowan and Acheulean technology are predominantly physical in nature, while the differences between Levallois and the earlier technologies are cognitive. This suggests a greater cognitive capacity for the Neanderthal Levallois manufacturers in contrast with the earlier hominin species. The results have, however, highlighted problems with a strict dichotomy between physical and cognitive skills. A number of material markers that could be related to skill were identified. Future work has been identified that could provide a fuller understanding of these findings.

Projectile points manufactured from antler, bone, ivory, and horn were a significant component of the Pleistocene hunter-gatherer’s weapons toolkit. While this situation appears to have been particularly the case for Upper Palaeolithic Europe where thousands of implements from Aurignacian to Azilian contexts have been recovered, elements of osseous technologies are increasingly being identified in Africa, Asia, Australia and North America. Projectile weaponry tipped with osseous raw materials therefore constitute a major dataset for the investigation of technological, subsistence, and social aspects of various and numerous Pleistocene populations. Having once been described as ‘impossible to evaluate’, investigation of maintenance and discard patterns for osseous projectile point assemblages has been severely neglected in the archaeological literature. As previous work has generally been restricted to qualitative descriptions of single artefacts exhibiting clear signs of rejuvenation or recycling, our knowledge of ‘the keeping’ of these toolkits is therefore extraordinarily limited. This thesis addresses this imbalance through beginning to build a robust methodology for investigating the maintenance, recycling, and discard of osseous projectile weaponry. More than 4,000 whole and fragmentary barbed and unbarbed osseous projectile points recovered from 25 Middle to Late Magdalenian sites located throughout France and southern Germany were examined, and through employing a multi-faceted approach incorporating metric analyses, statistics, use wear analysis, and the examination of contemporaneous depictions of weaponry, inter-site and inter-regional differences in maintenance and discard patterns were successfully identified. These results are discussed from a regional perspective in order to articulate these new data into interpretations of wider Magdalenian economic and social organisation.

This thesis presents a comprehensive characterisation of the Palaeolithic occupation of the Thar Desert, which is located in western India and south-western Pakistan. This is achieved through a combination of extensive syntheses of existing palaeoenvironmental and archaeological evidence and the development of new, interdisciplinary evidence for Upper Pleistocene hominin occupation in the Thar Desert through surface survey and excavation. Patterns of environmental variability in the Thar Desert are described to identify when and where the Thar Desert may have been habitable to hominin populations. Evidence for over 900 Palaeolithic sites is synthesised to identify existing spatial, typological and chronological patterns in the Thar Desert. Typo-technological descriptions of new Palaeolithic assemblages are described, and placed within chronological and environmental contexts based upon associations with previously studied sediment formations. The results of chronological, environmental and archaeological analyses from a new excavated site, Katoati, are described, which presents a significant new benchmark for Palaeolithic studies, both for the Thar Desert and southern Asia. The excavated assemblages from Katoati indicate a Middle Palaeolithic occupation of the Thar Desert during episodes of enhanced humidity >91ka, and a further Middle Palaeolithic occupation 65-55ka. These Middle Palaeolithic assemblages indicate considerable cultural continuity and offer a chronometric framework for the results of the surface survey. The identification of a number of technologically and typologically distinct artefacts in both excavated and surface contexts indicate significant similarities with Middle Stone Age assemblages from Arabia and the Sahara and Middle Palaeolithic sites in South Asia. As a result, the Thar Desert can be identified as a pivotal location for investigating major changes in Upper Pleistocene hominin demography between Africa and across southern Asia.

This thesis tests models on the dispersal of hominin populations in the Upper Pleistocene, specifically in relation to the Arabian Peninsula. It does so by conducting a quantified comparison of lithic assemblages from northeast Africa and southwest Asia. Lithic data from new excavations at the Jubbah Palaeolake in northern Saudi Arabia is compared to assemblages from Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Oman and other localities in Saudi Arabia. This is the first detailed inter-regional study of this area for Marine Isotope Stages 5 to 3, a critical spatial and temporal context in debates on both early modern human and Neanderthal demography and dispersal. The spatial and temporal character of the rich Arabian archaeological record correlate with emerging evidence for environmental change in Arabia; in particular the repeated dating of archaeological contexts to periods of climatic amelioration suggests that demographic growth was associated with periods of increased precipitation. The various factors influencing lithic variability and the methodologies by which they can be elucidated are reviewed. In particular this highlights the need for quantified and comparative analyses. A variety of analytical approaches are applied in this thesis, including the use of Correspondence and Principal Components Analyses to develop a nuanced view of lithic variability. Variability in cores is shown to largely reflect the related factors of size and reduction intensity. With analyses of debitage and retouched lithics a broadly similar picture emerges: assemblages which are heavily reduced have small cores and blanks and higher levels of retouch, and elements of shape variation also change in relation to reduction intensity. Elements of residual variability may reflect cultural differences. While it is felt that the evidence presented broadly orientates the Upper Pleistocene Middle Palaeolithic of Arabia to dispersals from Africa, this suggestion is subsumed with a problematization of using lithic evidence to understand dispersals. Aside from the need for further dated archaeological material from Arabia and surrounding countries, lithic analyses need to more thoroughly consider factors such as reduction intensity if we are to make robust inferences on population dispersals.