The PCMA UW Research Centre in Cairo held a PCMA scholar’s seminar. Due to the pandemic, this event was still closed to the public.
Grzegorz Michalec, MA, presented a talk on the subject: “Technological behaviours of the Acheulean complex in northeast Africa (Egypt and Sudan)”.
Abstract: “This seminar presents the assumptions of the PhD project and preliminary results on technological behaviours of the Acheulean complex in Northeast Africa encompasses Egypt and Sudan territory.
The Acheulean tradition was a cultural complex lasting for over 1.5 million years, stretching from Africa to Northwestern Europe and via the Levant and Arabian Peninsula to Southeast Asia. Its characteristic feature was the presence of LCTs – hand-axes and cleavers – usually produced bifacially and – less frequently – with the use of unifacial reduction. The Acheulean complex is a typologically homogenous cultural phenomenon that, however, displays interregional differences in morphometric features and production methods.
Sites discovered in Egypt and Sudan territory represent mostly the Late phase of the Acheulean (500-200 Kya) complex and only a few of them could be associated with the Middle Acheulean (older than 500 Kya).
The research approach applied to this project will be based on the Behavioral Archaeology and chaîne opératoire concept of lithic analysis. The purpose of this research is to identify each stage of the production methods of lithic tools used at selected sites, as well as to evaluate behavioral potential and skills of individual producers. Moreover, an attempt will be made to determine whether the accumulation of knowledge, improvement of skills and production method over time in Acheulean reflects in the morphology of LCT’s – if forms with high developed façonnage and great symmetry were produced later than those with a lower level of processing.”
The seminar was held on Monday, February 21, 2022.
You can read more about PCMA Scholarships here.