L'assemblage industriel de Song Keplek, Java Est

Abstract

Abstract The industrial assemblage of Song Keplek, East Java: A new look as lithic tools of modern man at the beginning of the Holocene in Indonesia This article surveys the available data regarding lithic industries of Insular Southeast Asia and demonstrates their variability. It also proposes a synthesis of results obtained recently in pre-Neolithic strata in the cave of Song Keplek, in the Gunung Kidul, East Java and therefore contributes some new markers in the cultural chronology of Modern Man in Java (the study of Indonesian Homo sapiens sapiens has only recently started producing results). The industrial assemblages unearthed during the Song Keplek excavation were produced by hunter-gatherer occupants of the cave, between 4500 and 6000 years B.P. The analysis of some 15000 blanks allowed us to build up a first typology of their stone tools and to elucidate the technological phases of core reduction. In a typological perspective, these stone tools have a strongly "Mousterian" aspect, with an important number of scrapers, notches, denticulated, naturally backed knives, borers, etc. A technological reading of the assemblage identified partially exploited cortical cores. The manufacturing process is non-Levallois and non-Discoid; it depends highly on an elementary, but organized method of debitage. Though a global reconstruction of the evolution of the stone tools of Modern Man in Indonesia is considered not possible for the moment, the present essay attempts to provide a first typo-technological classification that will help analyse other lithic assemblages from Java and the other islands of Indonesia.