Evidence for sophisticated raw material procurement strategies during the Lower Paleolithic—Hula Valley case study

Abstract

The Hula Valley has two key Acheulian sites: Gesher Benot Ya'aqov (GBY), a large flake Acheulian site with hundreds of basalt bifaces and a significant number of flint handaxes, and Ma'ayan Barukh (MB), where more than 3500 flint handaxes were collected. Over the last one million years, the valley was filled by alluvium and basalt flows, devoid of flint sources suitable for handaxe production. We conducted archaeological and geological surveys combined with an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry geochemical study to determine the source(s) of flint, comparing elemental compositions of handaxes from GBY and MB with those of different flint sources using a novel statistical method. The results demonstrate that Hula Valley Acheulian flint handaxes were derived from Eocene flint. For GBY, the nearest matching source for its small number of excavated handaxes is a secondary deposit of the Dishon streambed found ~8 km northwest of the site. A more likely source for both GBY and the thousands of MB handaxes is the Dishon flint extraction and reduction complex located 20 km to the west, a possibility also supported by the near absence of production waste flakes at the sites themselves. These findings support direct procurement strategy as early as the Lower Paleolithic.