40 Years of Excavations at Mitoc–Malu Galben (Romania): Changing fieldwork methodologies and implications for the comparability of archaeological assemblages

Abstract

Mitoc–Malu Galben (Romania) is one of the key-sites for the Upper Palaeolithic in Eastern Europe, with abundant Upper Palaeolithic archaeological layers embedded in a ∼14 meters long loess-palaeosol sequence. The excavations in 1978–1990 yielded rich remains of Aurignacian and Gravettian workshops. From 1992 to 1995, an international collaboration helped better define their stratigraphical position, age, and typological characteristics. Since 2013, our team has conducted new fieldwork focusing on interdisciplinary study of site formation processes and a detailed technological study of the lithic artefacts. These different excavation phases have employed quite substantially different fieldwork methodologies. Here, we explore the impact of the changing excavation methodologies on the comparability of the generated assemblages by analyzing the frequency of bladelets among the elongated blanks as well as the length distribution of elongated blanks. Our preliminary study allows us to suggest that some of the assemblages seem to be influenced by the fieldwork methodology employed by each excavation phase, but more studies are needed to start to understand how the assemblages are biased.