Alice Leplongeon

Since the emergence of prehistory as a field of study, lithic artefacts have been invoked as markers of past human dispersals. However, the meaning of similarities between artefact types and lithic assemblages as a whole is complex, leading to recurring debates surrounding population dispersals and local innovations. Taking North‐Eastern Africa as a case study, this article reviews the history of ‘diffusion‐convergence’ debates in the region and the current challenges faced in trying to ‘trace’ dispersals based on lithic data, before proposing potential new avenues to tackle this old controversy.

This paper is an initial report on our findings, which highlights the potential of the existing collection for further studies. It focuses on the history of the collection and provides an initial inventory of the material currently stored at the Department for Heritage Studies of the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA), in Tervuren, Belgium.

The world at 18,000 BP , published by Gamble and Soffer (The world at 18,000 BP. Vol. 2: low latitude, Unwin Hyman, 1990), represents the first, and so far the only, attempt at characterising and discussing the impact of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) on human societies on a global scale. At the time, they highlighted that research and data on the LGM in southern latitudes and the tropics in particular were scant. Since 1990, however, many sites dated to the LGM and located in tropical latitudes have been published. Many paradigms have changed regarding the peopling of the Americas, which allows the archaeology of this continent to be integrated into global scale studies of the LGM. The development of Pleistocene archaeology in tropical contexts, in parallel with methodological advances in cultural, geosciences and palaeoenvironmental studies have strongly reshaped what we know of the antiquity of human occupation in tropical regions and specific human–environment interactions. This article provides for the first time a pan-tropical perspective on the impact of the LGM on human groups living within the tropical latitudes, drawing from case studies in Southeast Asia, Africa and South America, specifically regions which have up until now never been discussed together. To this end, we focus on six different tropical regions between 30 and 10 ka. We present the archaeological and paleoenvironmental data available in these areas, along with proposed relationships for variations in these two records. Finally, we discuss at the regional scale the presence or absence of human changes (site density and techno-cultural change or continuity) before, during and immediately after the LGM.

The World at 18,000 BP, published by Gamble and Soffer in 1990 represents the first, and so far the only, attempt at characterizing and discussing the impact of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) on human societies on a global scale. At that time, they highlighted that southern latitudes and tropics in particular suffered from very little research and data on the LGM. Since 1990 however, many sites dated to the LGM and located in tropical latitudes have been published. Many paradigms have changed regarding the peopling of the Americas, which allows the inclusion of the archaeology of this continent to be integrated to global scale studies of the LGM. The development of Pleistocene archaeology in tropical contexts, in parallel with methodological advances in cultural, geosciences and palaeoenvironmental studies have strongly reshaped what we know of the antiquity of human occupation in tropical regions and specific human-environment interactions. This article provides for the first time a pan-tropical perspective on the impact of the Last Glacial Maximum on human groups living within the tropical latitudes, drawing from case studies in South-East Asia, Africa and South America, specifically regions which have up until now never been discussed together. To this end, we focus on six different tropical regions between 30 and 10 ka. We present the archaeological and paleoenvironmental data available in these areas, along with proposed relationships for variations in these two records. Finally, we discuss at the regional scale the presence or absence of human changes (site density and techno-cultural change or continuity) before, during and right after the LGM.

In the transition between the Middle Stone Age (MSA) and the Late Stone Age (LSA) in eastern Africa, the archaeological record shows a gradual and asynchronous decline in MSA features and an increase in LSA characteristics. A link between this pattern and climatic variations has not yet been tested in the region using lithic attribute analysis. To investigate that, we integrated technological data of blades and bladelets from eastern African contexts (Marine Isotope Stages 5–1) with large-scale paleoclimatic reconstructions. A principal component analysis (PCA) finds the first component (reflecting artifacts’ dimensions) significantly correlating with time. This highlights a progressive reduction in size over time, a trend that has already been suggested for the MSA-LSA transition. The second principal component reflects artifact shape and shows a significant correlation with the marked aridity of the dry season (a common proxy for seasonality in tropical regions), with higher specialization observed in more humid areas. Based on this, we propose a new model where more variable blades reflect greater versatility in foraging strategies as adaptation to environments that become more challenging during part of the year. On the other hand, when it rains more during the dry season and differences through the year are milder, a more specialized toolkit with thinner, longer elements would emerge from refining and adapting to uniform and predictable situations and challenges.

Despite its key role in out-of-Africa hominin dispersals, little is known about Pleistocene human occupation of north-eastern Africa outside the Nile Valley and desert oases. A survey in Wadi Abu Subeira aims to help fill this gap and attests to the repeated occupation of the Eastern Desert during the Pleistocene.

The ubiquity and durability of lithic artifacts inform archaeologists about important dimensions of human behavioral variability. Despite their importance, lithic artifacts can be problematic to study because lithic analysts differ widely in their theoretical approaches and the data they collect. The extent to which differences in lithic data relate to prehistoric behavioral variability or differences between archaeologists today remains incompletely known. We address this issue with the most extensive lithic replicability study yet, involving 11 analysts, 100 unmodified flakes, and 38 ratio, discrete, and nominal attributes. We use mixture models to show strong inter-analyst replicability scores on several attributes, making them well suited to comparative lithic analyses. Based on our results, we highlight 17 attributes that we consider reliable for compiling datasets collected by different individuals for comparative studies. Demonstrating this replicability is a crucial first step in tackling more general problems of data comparability in lithic analysis and lithic analyst's ability to conduct large-scale meta-analyses.

Cet article a pour objectif de contribuer à une meilleure compréhension du contexte historique et scientifique dans lequel les premières recherches sur la préhistoire égyptienne se sont développées. En particulier, il explore dans quelle mesure la construction de la préhistoire en tant que discipline en Égypte a été influencée par le modèle européen de préhistoire au début du XXe siècle à partir de deux études de cas, les travaux de Paul Bovier–Lapierre dans la région de l’Abbassieh, près du Caire, et les travaux d’Edmond Vignard dans la région de Kom Ombo. Influences of the European model of prehistory in Egypt at the beginning of the 20th century: the works of Father Paul Bovier–Lapierre, S. J. (1873–1950) and Edmond Vignard (1885–1969)] This article aims to contribute to a better understanding of the historical and scientific context of the development of early research in the prehistory of Egypt. In particular, it explores to what extent the construction of prehistory as a field in Egypt at the beginning of the 20th century has been influenced by the European model of prehistory, by focusing on two case studies, which are the works of Paul Bovier– Lapierre in the Abbassieh region, near Cairo, and the works of Edmond Vignard in the Kom Ombo region.