On questions surrounding the Acheulean ‘tradition’

Abstract

The Acheulean, sometimes known as ‘the great handaxe tradition’, is the longest-lasting entity in the human cultural record. The oldest sites are in Africa at around 1.6 million years ago and the most recent approach the last 100,000 years. The geographical extent is also enormous, ranging across Africa, the Middle East, most of Europe and large parts of Asia. Is it however a real tradition? The Acheulean represents a set of stone-working ideas that endure, but the strength of ‘tradition’ is often an assumption made by archaeologists. This paper re-examines Acheulean biface variation, looking at sets of assemblages measured in different ways, but amenable to discriminant analysis (DFA), which is able to highlight differences useful in classification. The analyses show significant differences between European and African assemblages. In the case of the Far East, in line with others, we provide further analyses suggestive of technological differences between putative ‘handaxes’ from Korea and some ‘classic’ western assemblages. However, it is not yet fully clear how far a ‘typical’ Acheulean tradition is represented, as matching of Far Eastern assemblages to other parts of the world depends to an extent upon the criteria used. With regard to the more general Acheulean paradox, the paper notes parallels in biological studies with the idea that a single widely extending phenomenon can incorporate elements of both unity and diversity.