An Upper Palaeolithic shell scraper from Ksar Akil (Lebanon)

Abstract

The vast majority of Palaeolithic tools that survive in the archaeological record are lithics. Tools made of marine shell are rarely found in Western Eurasian contexts, regardless of the time period. This paper reports the discovery of a Glycymeris valve from the Upper Palaeolithic level of Ksar Akil (Lebanon), excavated in the 1940s and stored in a museum since then. The shell comes from level IX, whose lithic industry is attributed to the Levantine Aurignacian. Careful macroscopic and microscopic analysis revealed that the shell had been worked deliberately into a scraper-type tool. The shell was directly dated, at ∼37 ka BP, an age much older than expected for its context, which was anticipated to be ∼30 ka BP. This illustrates the potential problems relating to the AMS radiocarbon dating of bivalve shell material from the Levantine coast.