What new about the North African Middle Stone Age at Eastern Morocco? The Aïn Beni Mathar - Guefaït open air sites

Abstract

The systematic surveys and excavations realized the last ten years at Eastern Morocco have allowed the identification of new archaeological North African Middle Stone Age (NAMSA) open air sites. Lithic assemblages, found on the surface as well as in stratigraphic position, are located on the exposed surfaces of river banks, around springs and on the slopes. Technologically these sites contain homogeneous sets of flake assemblages with an important Levallois component (mainly Levallois preferential flake and Levallois recurrent cores) but also discoidal strategies. The number of retouched flakes are important and mainly denticulates and scrapers. Some sites contain clear examples of tanged pieces and bifacial foliate typical from the “Aterian” assemblages. The preliminary results of the technological analysis of these lithic assemblages allowed their attribution to NAMSA. They present technological attributes which are very similar to those of other contemporaneous sites from the region (ex. Station Météo , Rhafas, Ifri N’ammar, Taforalt), but there are differences between the sites of theAïn Beni Mathar and Guefaït basindepending on the localization and the proximity of raw materials procurement areas and the type of activities realized. In this paper, we present an overview of all the openair sites on surface position of the region, but also the new data from Sahb el Gahr site, excavated this year on a large surface using three-dimensional mapping. It is a workshop site located on a natural flint outcrop in primary position. This research and the preliminary results obtained until now provide new insights about the significance of Eastern Morocco in the debates on the Middle Stone Age in North Africa. It has also provided important data about the settlement pattern dynamics in open air sites and their similarities and differences with the cave and rock shelter sites of the same geographical area.