 And so with the interview's presentation as sort of an introduction to the whole session with the outlining of some of the theoretical goals that we wish to shoot towards, we're now going to switch gears a little bit and take a more chronological perspective through time, starting with the Lord Paleolithic and ending in the Holocene. And the first one of these talks is by Akash Srinivas, and take your way. Thank you. Good afternoon everybody. I'll be looking at more technologies in both Western Europe and South Asia and looking at how variability can be assessed through expanding criteria. So for example, as Dr. Berg pointed out, we have various approaches to lithic analysis. Each have their own set of parameters, classifications and technological attributions. And for the longest time until recently, and in the case of South Asia, even in the present, they still, we still apply typological criteria such as the presence or absence of handaxes, LCTs or even the quantities of retouched flake elements in technological attribution. And also another point which Dr. Berg emphasized is that it's impossible to take terminologies we find in say a typological paradigm and approach it and apply it on a technological paradigm. So in order to, how do you say, get over these biases which unfortunately underestimate variability in assemblages because unfortunately we don't have the toolkit to look at variability in lithic assemblages on different resolutions. We are within the site, between sites, between regions or through time and also functions and the most controversial bit culture. So I will touch upon this in the discussion, but also in order to get through all of these, I decided to look at two assemblages, one from Western Europe, that's Isenia La Peneta and one from South Asia, that's Madhya Pipriya and both of these were selected because they are controversial in their technological attributions. So with regards to Isenia, I think some of you might be familiar with it because discovered in 1978 during the construction of the Napoli-Vastro Highway and because identified as a paleontological site and assigned the Isenia La Peneta final unit, it's located in the afterworld basin and the site is located in Quaternary Alluvium with intercalated tufts and Travertine which is the bedrock. Recent dates up to the entire unit three which is the archaeological layer at around 586,000 and those who have applied a more morphological or technological approach have assigned the mode one classification because of the absence of LCTs as well as the low incidences of retouched flake tools, but with expanding criterion using technological chain of pre-war analysis as well as behavioral traits, other workers have called it a mode two assemblages. With regards to Madhya Pipriya, it was discovered in 1961 by Dr. Fathri during his doctoral dissertation pre-work and it's located in the central Namada valley. It's a few kilometers upstream of Hathnora which is the site of the only hominid fossil in the subcontinent of the Pleistocene and it's located in a setting where it's mostly a shulian or mode two techno complexes. It's an open air site in a cemented gravel conglomerate on the left bank of the river which means it is primarily a secondary context site Unfortunately there are no dates, we absolute or relative so that's something we need to address. Fathri who did the initial work classified it as a Mahadevian industry and called it a pebble tool complex, pebble tool and flake which can be equated to a mode one technology because in this time period you have multiple uses of multiple terminologies. You have the European terminology of lower, middle and upper paleolithic as well as the African terminology of early stone age, middle stone age, late stone age as well as indigenous applications of something called the series one, series two as well as cultural norm increases like Mahadevian for the lower paleolithic or Nevasian for the middle paleolithic. So there is no standardization in terminology which is something we are addressing currently in the subcontinent and in 63 and 65 another doctoral candidate, Supeker during conducted excavations at this site he said it's a mixed assemblage comprising of three different traditions although it's coming from the same stratification the criteria he used was typological. So he said all the pebble codes and flakes belong to a chopper chopping tradition all the bi-faces belong to a national tradition and those that were you know on silica material was a middle stone age element. So this kind of classification is problematic so that's one of the reasons why we went to Mahadev because this most people who work in South Asia assume that this is one of the classic mode one sites in the subcontinent which might not be true. So the methods applied primarily is lithic analysis looking at 704 artifacts from unit 369 of Hisarnia only the flint elements as well as 121 elements from Mahadev Pipriya the discrepancy I'll get to in the next slide. Data collection included traditional flake and core attribution flake and core measurements and analyzed using technological chain of regard statistical and you know attribution following these parameters. So for Hisarnia and Mahadev Pipriya I used Varsky, Galopya Pareto and Mosquera which is a European standardized terminal comparative database so as not to you know regionally or make it Eurocentric in terms of the Indian assemblies I also applied Clark and Klanda for AFRAM Africa and Shea is more that terminology from the Middle East. So with regards to distribution in Hisarnia we can see that around 139 elements are core elements around 1100 are flake elements and you also have napto class and debris. One interesting find is the fact that we could identify the first evidence of fasunash on flint at the site. With regards to the collections distribution of collections from Mahadev Pipriya three collections were looked at the original Kathri collection of which only half of it could be recovered. There's a more recent Patnaik collection also from surface. So Kathri and Patnaik collections were from the surface and the Patnaik collection was done in late 2000s. The Supacal collection is from both excavated context I told you excavation 63 and 65 as well as surface collections unfortunately when we visited the repository out of the 1300 artifacts only 78 could be recovered nobody knows where the rest are and the 78 were fortunately recovered because they were in another site not even label Mahadev Pipriya. So that's why we have this giant discrepancy and unfortunately that is going to bias this study so I will deal with that too. So going back to Supacal's thesis this is the distribution of the artifacts out of the 1300 artifacts 860 and what he assigned to the early stone age. Again this is because he separated quartzite materials from silicate materials and considered everything to be from quartzite to be early stone age and those that are from chert or other silicate as middle stone age which is problematic. So we have LCTs as well as other core tools as well as flake and core components and reconstructing the I mean sorry characterizing the nature of the lithic assemblage at Isernia focusing on the flint material it's locally available in three phases one is affinitic without any micro crystals in it then we have microbraciated and microbraciated. We see there's a bit of selection towards affinitic and microbraciated varieties over the microbraciated varieties and the blanks are usually tabular and tabular slabs because the nature of the cleavage of the raw material ensures that it breaks down in that form. Surface is patinated with some evidence of aberration and as I previously stated the distribution includes a coarse flake, debris, natural glass and one shaped artifact. Two techniques of percussion were noted a direct handle percussion as well as bipolar and anal percussion and three methods of flaking were identified the dominant being the opportunistic followed by the centripetal and then the discord. With regards to the bipolar and anal percussion it is applied in two stages either as the primary technique as in the case of this core wherein the core blank is exploited only using the bipolar and anal technique or as the secondary technique wherein a core is previously exploited using some other strategy in this case unidirectional longitudinal and later in the final stage before discard it is subjected to bipolar and anvil. It is interpreted as means of trying to maximize raw material exploitation from the port blank. Like I said there's one reported or confirmed evidence of fasteners and flint. It doesn't look beautiful it doesn't look pretty but there is bifacial removal on an aphoritic slab and this is the largest class in the entire assemblage. It's almost two times bigger than the other class in the assemblage and this is very similar to some of the bifasals found in Guadassan, Nicola which is a Mo2 site in the vicinity. Also to ensure that it's not a core or it could be a core that's also used we took it to microscopic analysis and found three zones of utilization which Dr. Gabriel Baruti who's a microscopic expert in Ferrara he said is indicative of anthropogenic use, intentional anthropogenic use. With Isernia you also have another sequence using limestone which is also locally available mostly again as blocks because it's coming from the bedrock and again it's patinated and this includes only coarse flakes, coarse tools and debris so there are no fasteners in this and it's only exploited using a direct hard armor percussion and only with opportunistic method. With Mother Pipria we see that it's coarse grained quartzite, coarse and medium grained quartzite as well as cryptocrystalline silicates which is locally available from the stream bed. That's the dominant blank morphology and there is evidence of rolling as well as calculation on the artifacts. It's coarse flakes, coarse tools and bifaces are what the fasteners is composed of and it also indicates two techniques of percussion and three methods of flaking with the opportunistic being the most dominant followed by the discord and finally the centripetal. Here too the bipolar anvil is applied in two forms, in forms of cobble opening wherein the pebbles and cobbles are smashed open to access a platform and also in terms of flaking it for depth touch. This is some bifaces, you have a cleaver that's eight and two crude bifaces or two bifaces made from cobbles from the side. So the reconstructed reduction sequence at Isernia is that you have the angular class which are used as cores subjected to two forms of percussion to get flakes some of which are retouched some of which are utilized. Both the cores and the angular class were sometimes affected to retouch secondary flaking or utilization as co-tools and with one example of biface. The waste resulting from the entire sequence was sometimes utilized which somewhat mirrors mother pipria wherein you have water wound pebbles which are either selected for a natural breakage or subjected to bipolar and anvil to split the cobble which serves as a course which is then subjected to two forms of percussion to get flakes which is retouched or utilized. We have both the cobbles themselves as well as the cores after splitting that are subjected to work further work before used as co-tools or bifacially shaped as bifaces. Again waste recovered is sometimes utilized. So we see that law material for both the cases are available locally and there is some selection criteria that's applied. The bipolar angle was highlighted because according to Barsky it's something that is an innovative technological adaptation to deal with region specific external impact factors. The quality of raw material in case of Isernia and the class size in case of mother pipria. So cores are exploited minimalistically with minimal core preparation and also I mean few removals. There is also evidence of core management because of discord and centripetal cores and it's primarily given towards flake plant production. Flakes are retouched using multiple strategies and with evidence of secondary working both on flakes as cores as well as blank for flake tools and there is evidence of fashion. So applying the European criteria we see that similarities between both Isernia and mother pipria in terms of muskera, garotipaiso and Barsky indicating that it is most probably a mode 2 assemblage technocomplex using clark and paradise for mother pipria also similar mode 2 description and following shea is also mode 2. So in conclusion we can say that there is mode 2 in both mother pipria as well as Isernia which is similar to other sites in the region and elsewhere and technological variability within the mode 2 encompasses a wide range including assemblages that could pass off as mode 1 criterion if simple criterion such as presence, absence of bi-faces and LCTs are recorded. So intracite variability as we know in sites such as notarkirico and gaunatila rago where we have layers without bi-faces with sandwich between layers with bi-faces is one kind of variability and sites such as both Isernia and mother pipria in the region you have mode 2 but in that specific site you don't have a distinct mode 2 element space I mean it compares mode 2 technocomplex range all over Eurasia and Africa so that's a lot of space and time which covers so that also would lead to some kind of variability which needs to be addressed and in terms of function we know with regards to the function and hierarchy of the sites the kind of two assemblages would vary so we also need to look at the functional hierarchy of the site before ascribing technological variability and once we can negate all of this there's also the what if of cultural variability which is difficult to quantify but might have played a role so that's why we need to consider and expand various criterion including behavior and also site formation because that would bias the assemblage itself in the case of South Asia unfortunately site formation process is not exploited or used primarily so that's something that we need to address and we need to revisit previous collections because times change paradigms change and we need to update and in the case of mother pipria we are currently working on a project to get a more reliable dataset from primary collections and also excavations and then we'll know for sure if it is mode 2 or not I'd like to thank everybody who's here and all of the people on the slide for giving me access and the institution for giving me access to the lithic assemblages and thank you