Bolshoi Zangisan – The Early Upper Paleolithic Assemblage of the Tunka Valley (Southwestern Cis-Baikal)

The article presents the materials of the Early Upper Paleolithic site Bolshoi Zangisan. This site is located on the Tunka Valley (southwestern Cis-Baikal), 8,5 km east of the Turan village and was excavated in 1983–1987 by A. B. Fedorenko. Cultural remains were found in deformed soils of MIS 3, which in the regional climate-stratigraphic scheme corresponds to the Karginian interstadial. Archaeological and paleontological remains consist 535 specimens. A date of 37,020±500 cal BP was obtained from bone remains from this assemblage. The lithic collection includes 521 artifacts made of quartz, quartzite, diabase, chert and effusive rock. The primary knapping was aimed to produce of flakes, blades and bladelets. The presence of a carinated core and preforms of lateral carinated cores is of the greatest interest. In addition, the category of cores includes broad-faced and narrow-faced cores, and preforms for broad-faced and narrow-faced cores. The tool set contains triangular items, retouched blades and bladelets, side-scraper and endscrapers (include one flat nosed end-scraper), points on flakes and one point on blade, burins, splintered pieces, choppers, fragments of tools, retouched flakes and combination tool with radial processing (biface?). The presence of triangular items is of great interest in the toolkit. For the Early Upper Paleolithic of the Tunka Valley these tools were identified for the first time; in morphology they are close to triangular microliths of the Early Upper Paleolithic assemblages of Western and Central Asia. The nearest analogs of other tools (flat nosed end-scraper, burins, splintered pieces) are found in the Early Upper Paleolithic assemblage of the Tuyana site (also in the Tunka Valley), where the primary knapping also (but much wider) represents the carinated forms. Nevertheless, the lithic collection from Bolshoi Zangisan at this stage of research is not informative enough to conclude about the industrial unity of these assemblages. The only radiocarbon date that directly relates to the Bolshoi Zangisan assemblage indicates an older age

Archaeology · Geography · Upper Paleolithic · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology · Geology