Diversity of Lithic Production Systems During the Middle Paleolithic in France: Are There Any Chronological Trends?

Abstract

The technological approaches developed in Western Europe during the last two decades aim to define different systems of debitage (used here as a noun to denote the process of producing blanks). For the Middle Paleolithic, the best documented are the Levallois debitage system, the laminar production system, the discoidal debitage system, and the Quina debitage system. Their geographical and chronological distributions show some general trends: a greater diversity of the production systems coexisting within the same region (especially in Southwestern France) at the end of the Middle Paleolithic; an increased use of the systems characterized by a low degree of blank predetermination (Quina and discoidal systems, Levallois recurrent centripetal method), and the emergence of a flexible, multifunctional toolkit with a high curation potential. These changes can be attributed to groups with different technical traditions who kept their own fundamental technical identity but who also adopted similar mobility patterns during the unstable climatic period at the end of the Middle Paleolithic, resulting in shared forms of socioeconomic behavior (frequent population moves and increased residential mobility).