Middle and early upper Pleistocene human occupations in Southern Italy. A reassessment of the assemblages from Cala d'Arconte, Capo Grosso and Cala Bianca

In southern Italy, the number of Acheulean sites in a secure stratigraphic context is small and sites with control over the age of the deposit and of the artefacts are even less. The open-air sites of Cala d'Arconte, Capo Grosso and Cala Bianca, located along the Italian south-west coastline, represent, in this context, an important source of information for the Lower Paleolithic. These sites were discovered and preliminarily studied in 1967–70 by A. Palma di Cesnola and P. Gambassini of the University of Siena, who ascribed them to the Acheulean due to the recovery of several handaxes associated with flaking reduction systems part of which attributed to the Levallois technology. A small number of the handaxes was recovered in its stratigraphic position while Levallois artefacts were collected exclusively on surface, leaving the question about the relations between these two groups unsolved. Here, the sites of Cala d'Arconte, Capo Grosso and Cala Bianca and their lithic collections are reinvestigated by re-evaluating the stratigraphy at each locality and by analyzing the techno-typology of the available artefacts. During a test trench carried out at Cala Bianca, several Levallois artefacts were discovered in situ in the uppermost part of the sequence in a layer located above a tephra recently attributed to the X-6 marker of the Monticchio series dated to 108.33 ± 1.08 ka. We suggest that these in situ Levallois artefacts belong to a Mousterian layer that must be considered as the most plausible origin for the Levallois assemblage previously collected out of context at this site. In turn, we also suggest that the Levallois and biface components collected from the surface at Cala Bianca and Capo Grosso derive from distinct occupations in time.