The Levalloisian Industries of Egypt

Abstract

Within the past few years the multiplication in the Egyptian Nile Valley and adjoining desert of stone industries with Levalloisian technical characters or affinities, has suggested to me that a review of the evidence about them—geological, chronological and typological—might be of some momentary value pending the resumption in a post-war world of field-work in palaeolithic studies.Even without the perhaps beneficial interruption to them of the past six years, it was already, I think, becoming apparent before the war that the periodic stock-taking of world prehistory of rather a drastic kind was again due. It may make a clearance of several current doctrines and give others a rest. Among the latter I should myself like to number the overworked conception of culture-contact to account for modifications and new introductions within a given stone industry. Culture-contact may, I concede, have occasionally occurred in rare geographical passage-areas—Palestine is perhaps one of them, the Iberian peninsula another. But I doubt in general if, on the simple level of the Old Stone Age, we are justified in readily assuming that the industrial culture of one group was perceptibly affected by another until late in palaeolithic prehistory.