Lithic industries and plant processing in the Epipalaeolithic Maghreb: Evidence from use-wear analyses

The Holocene hunter-gatherers of the Maghreb are characterized by extensive use of wild plant resources; for food and for making containers, weapons and tools, ropes and fabrics. Some of the harvesting and processing operations of these materials can be performed with stone tools that leave traces on the tools. It is therefore possible to get information about the nature of the harvested and processed plants, the technical operations carried out with the tools and the design of the tools themselves. This information has a technological, economic and cultural scope, and is essential for thinking about the links between environmental changes and lithic industry variability. We present here the first data from technological and use-wear studies carried out on collections from Epipalaeolithic sites in Algeria and Tunisia, focusing on unretouched blades and bladelets from the Columnatian, blades and backed blades from the Typical Capsian, and notched blades and bladelets from the Upper Capsian.Our paper was presented at the session "Africa under the microscope" organized by G. Lucarini and S. Tomasso for the 15th Congress of the PanAfrican Archaeological Association for Prehistory and Related Studies, Rabat, 2018. This research was funded by the laboratory UMR 5608 Traces (Toulouse, France), as a part of the fond d'amorçage MeNeMOIA (« Du Mésolithique au Néolithique en Méditerranée occidentale: l'impact africain »), directed by T. Perrin, by the IDEX program of the Université Fédérale de Toulouse, also called MeNeMOIA and directed by T. Perrin, and then by the IRN DECAPAN (« Des derniers chasseurs aux premiers agropasteurs en Afrique du Nord », « From the last hunter-gatherers to the first agro-pastoralists in Northern Africa »), directed by T. Perrin, I. Amara, I. Sidéra. We are grateful to the people and institutions who helped us access prehistoric collections and equipment used for this research: M. Jackes (Department of Anthropology, University of Waterloo), H. de Lumley (Institut de Paléontologie Humaine, Paris), A. Grant, B. Raimbault (Ecology Teaching Lab, University of Waterloo), Dr. C. Yakymchuk, C. Drever (Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Waterloo). We thank the anonymous reviewers who helped improving our manuscript.Peer reviewe