Matthew Shaw

Nubian Levallois technology has recently risen to the forefront of debates surrounding Late Pleistocene human technological behavior, cultural traditions, and demographic histories. Named after the region where it was first identified, Nubian Levallois describes a specific method of lithic point production that occurs in Middle Palaeolithic (or Middle Stone Age) assemblages across arid North Africa, the Levant and Arabia. However, the recent identification of Nubian technology in separate, disconnected regions, such as South Africa and possibly India suggests there are more diverse scenarios of its emergence and spread than the original model of a broad Nubian technocomplex related to a single, expanding population from its north‐east African heartland. While few assemblages containing Nubian technology are directly dated, its proposed MIS 5 timing coincides with early modern human dispersals out of Africa, adding a further dimension of whether certain lithic technologies can be linked to specific geographic populations.

Currently, advancing this debate is hindered by having neither an accepted definition of what constitutes Nubian technology, nor a consensus on its role in modern human cultural evolution and population dynamics. To address this, 22 archaeologists met for an international workshop with two aims: (1) refining the definition of the Nubian technological method and how it can be identified in assemblages; and (2) re‐evaluating the relation- ship between Nubian technology as a reduction strategy and the Nubian Complex as a cultural entity in the context of current evidence. The specialist group of lithic analysts brought expertise in relevant assemblages—particularly those where Nubian technology forms a prominent component—from across Africa, the Levant and Arabia, contributing a diverse range of approaches and perspectives to this salient debate.

The Middle Stone Age record in southern Africa is recognising increasing diversity in lithic technologies as research expands beyond the coastal-montane zone. New research in the arid Tankwa Karoo region of the South African interior has revealed a rich surface artefact record including a novel method of point production, recognised as Nubian Levallois technology in Late Pleistocene North Africa, Arabia and the Levant. We analyse 121 Nubian cores and associated points from the surface site Tweefontein against the strict criteria which are used to define Nubian technology elsewhere. The co-occurrence of typically post-Howiesons Poort unifacial points suggests an MIS 3 age. We propose that the occurrence of this distinctive technology at numerous localities in the Tankwa Karoo region reflects an environment-specific adaptation in line with technological regionalisation seen more widely in MIS 3. The arid setting of these assemblages in the Tankwa Karoo compares with the desert context of Nubian technology globally, consistent with convergent evolution in our case. The South African evidence contributes an alternative perspective on Nubian technology removed from the ‘dispersal’ or ‘diffusion’ scenarios of the debate surrounding its origin and spread within and out of Africa.

The ubiquity and durability of lithic artifacts inform archaeologists about important dimensions of human behavioral variability. Despite their importance, lithic artifacts can be problematic to study because lithic analysts differ widely in their theoretical approaches and the data they collect. The extent to which differences in lithic data relate to prehistoric behavioral variability or differences between archaeologists today remains
incompletely known. We address this issue with the most extensive lithic replicability study yet, involving 11 analysts, 100 unmodified flakes, and 38 ratio, discrete, and nominal attributes. We use mixture models
to show strong inter-analyst replicability scores on several attributes, making them well suited to comparative lithic analyses. Based on our results, we highlight 17 attributes that we consider reliable for compiling datasets collected by different individuals for comparative studies. Demonstrating this replicability is a crucial first step in tackling more general problems of data comparability in lithic analysis and lithic analyst’s ability to conduct large-scale meta-analyses.