title: Reassessing the Aurignacian of Slovenia: techno-economic behaviour and direct dating of osseous projectile points.
abstract: The Palaeolithic of southern Central Europe has a long history of archaeological research. Particularly, the presence of numerous osseous projectile points in many early Upper Palaeolithic (EUP) assemblages in this region has attracted the attention of the international research community. However, the scarcity of properly identified and well-dated Aurignacian contexts represents an obstacle for investigation of the nature and timing of the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition. In this context, the question of whether Neandertals made Aurignacian osseous projectile points, either on their own or as a consequence of cultural interaction with anatomically modern humans (AMH), still remains an open issue. Here we reassess the EUP record of Slovenia by evaluating the Aurignacian character of the assemblages from Potočka zijalka, Mokriška jama and Divje babe I in the light of their suggested roots in the local Mousterian. We provide a comprehensive description of the lithic industry from Potočka zijalka, which represents one of the rare EUP assemblages of southern Central Europe with a representative number of lithic artefacts to be analysed from the perspective of lithic technology and raw material economy. Our re-analysis of the Slovenian assemblages is backed by a series of 11 new ultrafiltered collagen 14C dates obtained directly on associated osseous projectile points from the studied assemblages. The Aurignacian of Potočka zijalka underlines the remarkable consistency of the Early Aurignacian with low typo-technological variability across Europe, resulting from a marked dependence on transported toolkits and raw material conservation. The new radiocarbon determinations for the Aurignacian of Slovenia appear to post-date the 34-32 ka BP (thousands of years before present) threshold for the last Neandertals in the region. Although not falsified, the hypothesis of Aurignacian bone tools in southern Central Europe as a product of late Neandertals is not supported by our re-examination of the EUP record of Slovenia.
authors.affiliation: MONREPOS Archaeological Research Centre and Museum for Human Behavioural Evolution, Schloss Monrepos, 56567 Neuwied, Germany. Electronic address: moreau@rgzm.de.
authors.forename: Luc
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Moreau
authors.affiliation: Regentova 2, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia.
authors.forename: Boštjan
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Odar
authors.affiliation: Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QY, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Tom
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Higham
authors.affiliation: Ivan Rakovec Institute of Palaeontology, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia.
authors.forename: Aleksander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Horvat
authors.affiliation: Pokrajinskij muzej Celje, Trg Celjskih knezov 8, 3000 Celje, Slovenia.
authors.forename: Darja
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Pirkmajer
authors.affiliation: Narodni muzej Slovenije, Prešernova cesta 20, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Turk
mesh_terms: D001106:Archaeology; D003469:Culture; D005580:Fossils; D019015:Geologic Sediments; D006801:Humans; D017524:Slovenia; D013672:Technology / Q000295:instrumentation*
keywords: AMS dating; Lithic technology; Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition; Organic points; Raw material economy; Southern Central Europe