The Middle Palaeolithic of the central Trans-Urals: Present evidence

Abstract

The Urals and the adjacent regions, located at the easternmost limits of Europe and representing a geographic borderline with northern Asia/West Siberia, are of key relevance for comprehension of the culture-historical trajectories and environmental contexts of early peopling to this still marginally explored montage Russian territory. Complex Quaternary transformations of regional natural settings due to climate change controlled timing and dynamics of Palaeolithic occupation in the central mountain zone, foothills and adjoining Fore-Ural and Trans-Ural plains. Following the earliest and still sporadically mapped presence of the pre-Middle Pleistocene humans in the upper Kama Basin, the first marked geoarchaeology evidence is linked to the Middle Palaeolithic inhabitation of the Urals foothills and the mountain inner valleys. The Chusovaya River valley and its tributary valleys, transecting the Central Ural's mountain range NE–SW, were the principal corridor for the following Middle and Upper Palaeolithic migrations into the eastern (Trans-Ural) regions and West Siberia. Except for mountain karst formations, present Middle Palaeolithic habitat indices come from the eastern Ural foothills, the Leba, Neiva and Tara River basins, with occupation and workshop sites nearby natural exposures of rocky outcrops exploited as raw material deposits for lithic industry production. Diagnostic technological attributes of employed Levallois and bifacial stone flaking techniques with corresponding lithic artefact inventories provide some means for the general pre-Upper Palaeolithic age-assessment of the investigated sites. The limited number of the mapped Middle Palaeolithic loci does not allow evaluation of spatio-temporal settlement patterns. The present cultural evidence illustrates successful biological and behavioural adjustments to the Central Urals ecosystems in the framework of Middle/Late Pleistocene cultural development.