25 February 2009

The Paleolithic of Turkish Thrace: PART 5- Kustepe

This is a part from "The Paleolithic of Turkish Thrace: Synthesis and Recent Results".

Kuştepe
Kuştepe lies nearly 300 meters in the northwest of Karansıllı village on a hill overlooking a small valley. The GPS coordinates of Kuştepe are 40.58N and 27.11E, and the site is situated at nearly 230 meters asl. Stones, including both artifacts and unmodified cobbles are present at a higher density than at Yatak.

For the most part artifacts from Kuştepe are manufactured on quartz. The industry is characterized by choppers on quartz and by some discoïd cores. The cores present the same characteristics as the Yatak cores, in that platforms are unprepared and flakes were struck directly from the cortical surface. One of the choppers is actually produced by thick, abrupt retouch on a large cortical flake. We also note the presence of an anvil-stone showing pronounced signs of battering resulting from heavy percussion. These signs of impact are confined to an area about two centimeters across on a flat pebble 10 centimeters in maximum length. Flint and quartzite are poorly represented at Kuştepe; only a few choppers of these raw materials were present.

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