Early Acheulean pebble tools in Moravia - Valoch - 2013

During the past 25 years in Southern Moravia (Czech Republic) numerous localities with surface finds of Lower Palaeolithic pebble tools have been registered. The artefacts have been discovered and collected by external co-workers of the Anthropos Institute, Václav Effenberger and Antonín Otta. Individual localities have gradually been published and there now follows a summary supplemented with new finds. The findspots are mostly situated on fluvial gravel accumulations at the level of about 30 m above the present-day floodplain; just those in the vicinity of Dolní Kounice are placed on the tops of higher elevations where only some residues of Lower Pleistocene or Tertiary gravels are found. The tools were mostly made of quartz pebbles, less frequently of quartzite or other kinds of rock (in the neighbourhood of Dolní Kounice, for example, chert was often used). All artefacts have had their edges rounded by the agency of wind and the surfaces polished, cherts are strongly patinated. The red-brown colouring of the cortex in some quartz artefacts suggests that they were exposed to pedogenetic processes of ferretisation, which means that they were already at that time placed on the surface of gravels. In terms of typology, the industries include choppers, chopping tools, polyhedrons, cores (and épannelés), hand axes and flakes which were also retouched and modified, mostly to side-scrapers (Pravlov I, Pøibice I). Based on the occurrence of hand axes and with regard to analogies from France and Germany, these industries can be classed with Early Acheulean. Their dating is discussed in the work; the only hint for their chronostratigraphic position is provided by their relation to the ferreto soil and to the 30 m terrace. The terrace and the soil emerged before the end of the Cromerian complex. Therefore it can be supposed that at least some of the industries are of Upper Cromerian age. This article is a reprint of a previously published article (Valoch K., 2000: Anthropologie (Brno) 38, 2: 121-147).

Keywords

Moravia - Early Acheulean - Surface finds - Pebble tools

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