Geoarchaeological and geochronological investigations of Palaeolithic open-air sites in Epirus, Greece

Abstract

The province of Epirus in north-west Greece hosts the largest Middle Palaeolithic record in Greece (Elefanti and Marshall, 2015). Most of the known Palaeolithic sites in Epirus belong to a particular type of open-air sites, which consist of terra rossa deposits and are known as ‘red-bed sites’ (Fig. 1). Since the 1960’s, it has been established that, wherever these red-beds occur, they are almost always associated with Palaeolithic artifacts –in fact, some of these sites are littered with thousands of chipped-stone tools (Dakaris et al., 1964; Higgs and Vita-Finzi, 1966). The interpretation of this association has generated a long and intense controversy (Bailey et al., 1992; Runnels and van Andel, 1993; King and Bailey, 1985; King et al., 1997; Papakonstantinou and Vassilopoulou, 1997; Papagianni, 2000; Runnels and van Andel, 2003; van Andel and Runnels, 2005; Tourloukis, 2009; Tourloukis et al., 2015). For a long time, those sites have been regarded as a fortuitous admixture of archaeological remains from different periods: sites with reworked deposits that essentially provide no context for the artifacts and are, therefore, of little archaeological value.