Abstract

The discovery of the pre-Mousterian monument, dating back to the Middle Pleistocene era, in the mountain-forest zone of the Southern Urals is of great interest both for archaeology, in particular, considering the problem of time and ways of setting on the territory, and for geology, taking into account the dating of the terraces of river valleys in the mountainous part of the region. The site-workshop Akbulatovo-3 is confined to the cover deposits of the III floodplain terrace of the Belaya river, 15 m above the modern level of the river, including pebble and clastic material from quartzite in the deposits of brownish-brown loam of periglacial type of the late Risian time. The collection of items from quartzite (447 items) is represented by a variety of cores: cuboid, orthogonal, sub-cone, and biplatformed. The tools were made both by bifacial processing and on flakes, less often on amorphous plate-like chips. Among them, there are “Acheulean” forms – choppers, peaks, simple scrapers, and “Upper Paleolithic” ones – scrapers, burins, punctures, carvers, and chisel tools. Such a combination of archaic types of tools and cores with “progressive” forms of tools and cores, characteristic of the Moustier and Upper Paleolithic gives grounds to attribute the complex to the end of the Acheulean era or to the beginning of the Moustier. A similar monument, combining the Acheulean types of tools and cores with the Mousterian and Upper Paleolithic ones, was discovered on Lake Turogoyak in the Chelyabinsk region – the site Naves (Island of Vera 6a) at the porphyrite exits. This allows the authors to attribute them to a single technological tradition, called the “Akbulatov type of industry”.

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