Situated between the Altai Mountains and the Chinese Loess Plateau, the current territory of Mongolia played a pivotal role in Pleistocene human population dynamics in Northeast Asia with ...archaeological evidence suggesting the existence of cultural links with southern Siberia beginning in the Late Pleistocene. Here, we present preliminary results from the newly discovered site of Kharganyn Gol 5 in northern Mongolia. The results obtained from the Kharganyn Gol 5 site allow new reconstructions of chrono-cultural sequences and human behavior in eastern Central Asia. The site has yielded evidence of human occupation corresponding to several phases of the regional Upper Paleolithic. In addition, we present the first evidence of human occupation of the region prior to Greenland Interstadial 12 (GI12; 40,000–43,000 BP) and discuss the implications of such data. The Kharganyn Gol River basin contains sedimentary rock formations including numerous raw material outcrops, containing various types of chert. Prehistoric people used all these chert varieties for tool production, but the modes of raw material exploitation changed through time. This paper reports the presence, unique in Central and North Asia, of a non-utilitarian object made of muscovite mica in an Initial Upper Paleolithic assemblage in Archaeological Horizon 5 of the Kharganyn Gol 5 site.
The highlands of Central Asia played a crucial role in cultural development across the later Holocene, serving to foster the diffusion of cultural elements by late prehistoric populations and to ...support the trans-Eurasian exchange routes of the historic Silk Road. However, the early chronology of human occupation in many areas of Inner Asia – particularly the high Pamir Mountains – remains poorly understood. Intensive archaeological study of this area by Soviet archaeologists first began between 1950 and 1970, at which time scholars theorized that the earliest human occupation in the high valleys dates to the Final Pleistocene. To explore early human history in this key region of cultural transmission, a joint expedition conducted new excavations at the archaeological site of Kurteke, confirming that there was human presence in the area as far back as 14 ka BP, and that it persisted discontinuously until the Bronze Age (ca. 4000BP). We applied a multidisciplinary archaeological and paleoenvironmental approach to investigate early human activity at the site, including lithic analysis, absolute dating, and zooarchaeological and archaeobotanical analyses.
Cet article présente les résultats des fouilles menées durant les années 2016–2017 au nouveau site stratifié du Paléolithique supérieur d’Ushboulak. Le gisement d’Ushboulak se situe dans la vallée de ...Shiliktinskaïa (Kazakhstan oriental). Le site a livré huit couches stratigraphiques, qui ont fourni du matériel archéologique depuis la période holocène jusqu’aux premières étapes du Paléolithique supérieur. La collection des artefacts la plus représentative a été découverte dans les couches 6 et 7. L’industrie lithique issue de ces couches est caractérisée par le débitage orienté vers la fabrication des lames par la méthode parallèle uni- et bidirectionnelle lors de la réduction volumétrique des nucléus. L’ensemble des pièces est représenté par des types d’outils, tels que racloirs tranversaux et burins sur lames, outils tronqués et facettés, lames appointées, lames pédonculées à l’extrémité obtuse, nucléus-burins. L’ensemble de ces caractéristiques ainsi que la datation obtenue pour la couche 6, entre 45.249 et 44.012cal.BP, permettent d’attribuer les couches 6 et 7 au Paléolithique supérieur ancien et de considérer le Kazakhstan oriental comme une région géographique intermédiaire entre les complexes contemporains de l’Altaï de montagnes, en Dzoungarie et en Mongolie.
In this paper we present the results of two years (2016 and 2017) excavations at new stratified Upper Paleolithic site of Ushbulak, situated in Shiliktinskaia Valley, Eastern Kazakhstan. There are eight lithological layers, which contain the archaeological material from Holocene to Initial Upper Paleolithic. The most significant number of artifacts was discovered in the layers 6 and 7. The debitage assemblages from these layers represent primary knapping oriented towards blade production by parallel uni- and bidirectional methods of volumetric core reduction. The tool assemblage includes several types, such as end-scrappers, burins on blades, truncated-faceted pieces, and points with basal trimming, bitruncated blades and burin-cores. These features together with a date 45.249–44.012cal.BP from layer 6 allow us to attribute these two layers 6 and 7 to the Initial Upper Paleolithic and to consider Eastern Kazakhstan as a region between synchronous sites of the Initial Upper Paleolithic in Altai Mountains, Dzungaria and Mongolia.
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