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The 1‐million‐year‐old quartz assemblage from Pont‐de‐Lavaud (Centre, France) in the European context

The Pont‐de‐Lavaud site, located in the Centre Region of France (Creuse Valley), yielded a quartz lithic assemblage composed of a few hundred artefacts with cores, pebble tools, flakes and flake‐tools, mixed with several thousand debris items and pebbles. The archaeological site is covered by a fossil fluvial deposit from the Creuse River (sheet I, with a relative altitude of + 90/105 m), dated by Electron Spin Resonance at the site itself to around 1 Ma. We will focus in this paper on the lithic assemblage with clear anthropogenic features to describe the technological strategies applied to quartz pebbles, with the help of experiments. The core technology is based on short ‘chaînes opératoires’ on local quartz aimed at producing pointed end‐products on pebbles and flakes. The methods and techniques include both the bipolar technique on an anvil and direct percussion with a hard hammer. The reduction sequences were strongly conditioned by the morphology and the physical characteristics of the raw material. Few flakes are retouched. The Pont‐de‐Lavaud lithic assemblage is one example of the diversity of the 1‐Ma European industries. The assemblage shows techno‐cultural behavioural variability at this period and adaptation to raw material constraints. Comparisons with series where the use of quartz is widespread demonstrate the ability of hominins to use stones of varying quality and to adapt technology to the raw material in zones located beyond the 45th parallel north.