On Observations on the Lower Palaeolithic of Northeast Asia

Yi and Clark's paper (CA 24:181-202) pleased me very much, for it illuminated as never before the question of the partition of the Lower Palaeolithic into chopper and handaxe traditions. While it is true, as several commentators mention, that opposition to Movius's scheme has been raised now and then, it has been feeble and at best not influential. To this day, every textbook contains that scheme, and-at least as far as I am aware-no other views are even hinted at. In presenting it in introductory courses, I take care to follow it immediately with my own opposing view, but I always feel as if I were uttering some kind of heresy. I am confident that Yi and Clark's article will cause textbooks to be modified in this regard, and I myself will be presenting the case to my classes in a different tone than before. This, in my opinion, is the article's major contribution. The authors' plea for recognition of the diversity of the vast area under study is unexceptionable, and it is no wonder that none of the commentators has objected to it. In comprehending this diversity we still have a long way to go factually, theoretically, and methodologically. All agree on this point. With the authors, I see no such belittling of Movius in their presentation as a few of the commentators note. With them, I greatly admire his work and consider him one of the outstanding prehistorians of our time. The issue here is not Movius, but his outdated view of the Lower Palaeolithic. Without criticism, science would be doomed to stagnation. Criticism should never be offered or received on a personal level; I don't think the authors' criticism in any way hurts Movius as a person or a scholar. As several commentators point out, not a few references directly relevant to the discussion seem to have escaped the authors' scrutiny. I wonder whether they have ever seen my paper on so-called Clactonian dispersals (Ohel 1978), in which I explicitly challenge the schematic partition of the Lower Palaeolithic, or my replies to the many comments on my article on the Acheulean/Clactonian problem (Ohel 1979). I came to doubt the partition scheme in the course of my 1975-77 research on the Clactonian, which is still widely accepted as an offshoot of the so-called pebble culture (or tradition), i.e., a nonhandaxe industrial complex, therefore non-Acheulean. The view I favored following my study was and still is that the Clactonian was not an independent culture or tradition; rather, "Clactonian sites" were preparatory areas for the manufacture of Acheulean tools (e. g., Ohel 1979, Ohel and Lechevalier 1979). As the authors and several commentators say, more than just a few "bizarre" handaxes have been found in assemblages within the "chopper zone" (even at the "high temple" of the chopper tradition, Zhoukoudian), where-by definition, so to speakthey should not occur at all. I was confronted with the same situation in reexamining the Clactonian. Moreover, as is also stated, handaxes are not the only index fossil of the Acheulean (and, as the late Fran? ois Bordes told me in the summer of 1980, backed knives, for example, are just as indicative of the Acheulean as handaxes). Conversely, there are quite a number of pure and obvious Acheulean sites or levels all over the Old World that for one reason or another lack handaxes. Prompted by the above-mentioned arguments with dedicated proponents of the partition scheme, I organized a symposium to be held at the XIth ICAES in Canada this summer on Acheulean/pebble-culture relationships. In it I had planned to read a paper forcefully rejecting the partition and citing the many recent publications in which the existence of handaxes within the traditional out-of-bounds zones is discussed (e.g., Bartstra 1976, 1978, 1982; Bordes 1968; Boriskovsky 1978; Derevianko 1978; Hayden 1979; Mohapatra 1981; Narr 1981; Okladnikov 1978; Sankalia 1978). Unfortunately, I have been prevented from attending the Congress by health complications, but I am sure that Yi and Clark's article will generate echoes in the symposium and help to shake at long last the partition's walls. Finally, I would like to venture an alternative hypothesis for all those Lower Palaeolithic and post-Oldowan assemblages traditionally subsumed under the so-called chopper tradition or pebble culture. From about 1.5 million years to about 100,000 years B.P., the Acheulean industrial complex dominated the Old World. (Of course, I am speaking in technological terms only.) Basically and fundamentally the technology was the same everywhere. At the same time, there were numerous variations, temporal and spatial, no doubt a reflection of physical, environmental, sociocultural, stylistic, functional, seasonal, and other factors. To use a musical analogy, these are all variations on the same theme. In a mood of amusement I like to label the 1.5-million-year time span subsequent to the Oldowan and prior to the Mousterian or Middle Palaeolithic "The First Worldwide Empire," meaning by "Empire," of course, simply the enormous spread of basic industrial traits. To many this suggestion may sound too simplistic, perhaps too linear, and surely too universal. I must therefore stress once again that the universality is merely at the fundamental level of technology and that complexity is everywhere represented by the specific variations. The Acheulean industrial complex is essentially of a core and/or flake technology incorporating such "revolutionary" modes of production as, e.g., the Levallois technique. It is, in my view, unique in its worldwide technological dominance, resembling neither what preceded it nor what followed it. Doubtless the main focus of our studies everywhere should be upon the meaning of its variations. Nevertheless, as I see it today the Lower Palaeolithic was basically (though only basically) one. If this is condemned as too "linear" a view, so be it.