About the spatial and chronological relationship between the Mousterian and Micoquian industries of East Europe

Abstract

The geography of the Middle Paleolithic of East Europe (referring to the European part of the former USSR) shows two main peculiarities. The first is a very uneven (patchy) spatial distribution of sites which form dense local accumulations separated by vast empty spaces. The second is the nearly ubiquitous cooccurrence of the Mousterian and Micoquian industries. Both are present in all major accumulations from Transcarpathia in the west to the Volga-Don interfluve in the east, including also the Prut-Dniester region, the Donets-Azov basin, the Crimean Peninsula and the Northwestern Caucasus. The distribution areas of the two industries in East Europe not merely overlap but coincide (except the Northeastern Caucasus where only Mousterian assemblages are known by now). This pattern does not agree well with the opinion that these industries should be regarded as two independent cultural traditions, unless one assumes they were time-transgressive. In contradiction to some of the available absolute dates, the relative chronology of the Mousterian and Micoquian assemblages seems to corroborate such an assumption. The analyses of the published stratigraphies of the sites where both industries occur in one stratigraphic column shows that, as a rule, the Micoquian tends to overlay the Mousterian. Such a situation was observed at Kůlna (Czechia), Biśnik, Nietoperzowa, Ciemna, Zwierzyniec (Poland), Korolevo 1, Jezupol 1 (Ukraine), Ripiceni Izvor (Romania). The inverse sequence was found in Crimea, at Kabazi 2, Karabi Tamchin and, probably, Shaitan-Koba. Therefore, there are grounds to think that at least in some parts of east Central and west Eastern Europe the two technocomplexes succeeded one another.