Beyond Inherited Lithic Frameworks: New Considerations on Middle Pleistocene Technical Behaviour in Southeast Asia

Justin Guibert1*, ZHOU Yuduan2, NGOV Kosal3, Jutinach Bowonsachoti4,5, Marian C. Reyes6,7, Prasit Auetrakulvit8, HENG Sophady3, Valéry Zeitoun9, Thomas Ingicco10, Jean-Baptiste Lambard10, and Hubert Forestier10

Southeast Asia plays a unique role in the history of research into Early Human societies. Since the end of the 19th century, palaeoanthropological discoveries made in Java as well as in China, combined with the discovery of lithic assemblages on cobbles, often on surface within alluvial systems, have highlighted the importance of this region for understanding human dispersal in the Early Palaeolithic in tropical environments. However, the long-term persistence of the ‘pebble/cobble phenomenon’ in Mainland and Island Southeast Asia has contributed to its “marginalisation” in the major narratives of the technical and cognitive evolution of Early Palaeolithic. This peripheral position is largely the result of the historiographical construction of a ‘Far East’ based on Western European and African paradigms. Southeast Asian lithic assemblages have frequently been described as ‘archaic,’ ‘simple,’ or ‘stable,’ a typological reading crystallised by the “Movius line model”. Despite the challenges raised by the identification of bifacial (handaxes) tools and “LCT” assemblages, this framework continues to guide interpretations, sometimes reinforced by the retrospect application of techno-cultural categories such as “Oldowan”, “Acheulean” or “Mode 1/Mode 2” technical systems under the shadow of linear evolutive interpretations about Palaeolithic cultures. Based on recent research conducted in Mainland and insular Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Thailand and the Philippines), this paper offers a critical and methodological review of Middle Pleistocene lithic assemblages in a tropical context. It examines the epistemological impact of inherited conceptual lithic frameworks in the construction of cultural chronologies and typologies and then develops a techno-structural approach focused on the cobble as a “production matrix”, revealing a diversity of technical solutions integrating heavy and small tools.