The emergence of Levallois technology in the western Mediterranean.

The introduction of Levallois method in Europe was an asynchronous event of reorganization of the local core technology. Although the chronologies of this new knapping method are well established in Northern Europe, a certain disagreement exists in the literature regarding the Mediterranean territories. Some authors argued that Levallois technology was developed in southern Europe at about 300 ka or even earlier . The absence in some sites of secure chronological dates induced others to propose a younger age for the Italian Peninsula. Another source of discrepancy is related to the attribution to an early Levallois production of some lithic series in which the presumed Levallois blanks might be interpreted as by-products of other knapping strategies. The state of uncertainty about the analyses of some collections limited the inclusion of the western Mediterranean from the debate over the emergence of Levallois in Europe. In this research the lithic assemblages of Unit VIII and Unit VII of San Bernardino Cave (Italy) are presented. These assemblages are dated with ESR and U/Th methods respectively to MIS 7a and the beginning of MIS 6. The technological analyses detected the appearance and the development of Levallois method. These results add new data to the understanding of the dynamics of the origin of this technology in the late Middle Pleistocene