Bone retouchers and technological continuity in the Middle Stone Age of North Africa

Evidence for specialised bone tools has recently been reported for the Middle Stone Age of North Africa [one], which complements similar finds of slightly younger age in South Africa [two, three]. However, until now scant reference has been made to lesser known tools also made of bone ('bone retouchers') that were employed specifically as intermediaries for working or refining stone artefacts, that are sometimes present in these assemblages. In this paper we describe 20 bone retouchers from the cave of Grotte des Pigeons at Taforalt in north-east Morocco. This is the largest stratified assemblage of bone retouchers from a North African MSA site, and the biggest single collection so far from the African Continent. A total of 18 bone retouchers was recovered in securely dated archaeological levels spanning a period from ~ 84.5 ka to 24 ka cal BP. A further two bone retouchers were found in a layer at the base of the deposits in association with Aterian artefacts dating to around 85,000 BP and so far represent the earliest evidence of this type of tool at Taforalt. In this paper we present a first, detailed description of the finds and trace the stages of their production, use and discard (chaîne opératoire). At the same time, we assess if there were diachronic changes in their form and function and, finally, explore their presence in relation to stone tools from the same occupation layers of the cave.

Citation

: Turner E, Humphrey L, Bouzouggar A, Barton N (2020) Bone retouchers and technological continuity in the Middle Stone Age of North Africa. PLoS ONE 15(3): e0230642. https:// doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230642

Type

Journal Article

Item Description

Copyright: © 2020 Turner et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The attached file is the published version of the article.
NHM Repository

ISSN

1932-6203

EISSN

1932-6203

License

openAccess

cb