The Near East Epipaleolithic: Review of Research Concepts
Abstract
Currently Levant Epipaleolithic is the best studied territory in terms of the sites quantity, reconstructed technologies, settlements and burial complexes, non-use activity objects; and environment reconstructions. Its study has a great importance due to the emergence of new hypotheses of the genesis and development of the Western Central Asia Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic. The present work is devoted to coverage of the basic concepts of Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene complexes of the Middle East in the foreign historiography. The article discusses the term “Epipaleolithic”, its application and interpretation; the questions of chronology and stages of Epipaleolithic industries; the questions of early technological innovations and their further spread on the territory under study, the questions of cross-cultural interactions between the ancient populations. At each highlighted Levant Epipaleolithic chronological, records have been made of considerable variability of complexes which expressed through a large variety of typological and technological non-geometric and geometric microliths. This variability is interpreted as the results of climate change adaptation, associated with the last glacial maximum, or as human groups’ adaptation to certain environmental conditions.
DOI 10.14258/izvasu(2015)3.2-16
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