New technological considerations on some Lupemban museum collections from the Congo Basin

Abstract

In the Congo Basin, a regional industry attributed to the Middle Stone Age, the Lupemban, has been empirically considered as a technological adaptation to African tropical rainforests. The “forest industry” hypothesis is based on the presence of diverse heavy-duty tools and their location on the valley bottoms of the Congo Basin. Nowadays, the Lupemban complex in Central Africa remains poorly contextualized preventing us from integrating this geographical crossroad into a pan-African Middle Stone Age framework. Other features such as blade production, backing, hafting and pigment-use are also associated with the Lupemban complex, suggesting an important role of this industry for understanding the emergence and intra-continental diffusion of modern human behaviours. However, this was lacking strong supporting evidence such as chronological, stratigraphic and paleoenvironmental context, as well as thorough technological and functional evaluation. Indeed, only few sites contributed to define the Lupemban and these latters are mainly peripheral to the Congo Basin. In addition, most of the Congo Basin Lupemban collections have been collected several decades ago. Even though poorly documented, these collections constitute a major fund for documenting the prevailing technological features of the Lupemban. Here, we present a technological analysis of lithic production using a qualitative approach to describe five Lupemban lithic collection stored at the Museum national d’Histoire naturelle and at the Institut de Paléontologie Humaine that were collected between the 1930s and 1970s in the Central African Republic and the Republic of Congo. We highlight some repeated technological patterns and discuss their representativity for characterizing Central African Upper Pleistocene lithic assemblage.