Late Pliocene Artefacts from Northern Pakistan

Abstract

In an earlier article (Rendell and Dennell I985), we reported the I983 discovery of handaxes and other stone artefacts in firmly dated contexts between o.s and 0.7 million years old at two localities in northern Pakistan. We now report the discovery of what we regard as hominid-struck stone artefacts and/or debitage in a geological horizon at another locality in northern Pakistan that is, in our opinion, ca. 2 million years old. These artefacts were also discovered in I983, in the area near Riwat, south-east of Rawalpindi (fig. i), where members of the British Archaeological Mission to Pakistan had previously been mapping a complex series of Upper Pleistocene fluviatile and aeolian deposits spanning the last I50,000 years. The first to be found was embedded in a gritstone outcrop at the base of a deeply incised gully. Flow in the gully is ephemeral, and this outcrop now forms the head of a small waterfall after heavy rains. Erosion of this gritstone had exposed a quartzite cobble (fig. 2) from which some flakes had been detached. As the flaked surfaces were still partially embedded in the gritstone, the flaking of this piece could not have taken place after the erosion of the gritstone to its present form. The piece was therefore photographed and carefully chiselled out and was found to have been flaked in three planes, involving the removal of six and perhaps seven flakes (fig. 3). Downstream of this find, the same conglomerate horizon is exposed as a series of large tabular fragments (up to io m2) caused by undercutting and subsequent fracturing. Careful inspection of the surfaces of these blocks for other quartzite clasts