The preliminary results of the Mygdonia basin archaeological survey project, Greece

Abstract

During the past 2 million years, mass dispersal events of mammals from Africa into Eurasia possibly triggered the arrival of early hominins (Bar-Yosef and Belfer-Cohen, 2001; Abbate and Sagri, 2012; Koufos and Kostopoulos, 2016; Muttoni et al., 2018). At Early Pleistocene sites, where rich fauna complements the presence of carnivore and hominin activity, important taphonomic processes further complicate the recovery and interpretation of early human behaviors and remains. Evidence of hominins from this period is sparse and is found at only a handful of locations outside of Africa (Garcia et al., 2013). Even though an obvious gap continues to exist in Greece and the Balkans, this region of Europe is located in the direct path of human migrations out of Africa and Asia. For the Middle Pleistocene, the paleoanthropological, archaeological, and paleontological records of Greece are currently improving, in large part through the efforts of the ERC projects PaGE and CROSSROADS and the associated MegaPal survey (e.g., Panagopoulou et al., 2015; Harvati et al., 2018; Karkanas et al., this volume; Tourloukis et al., this volume; Athanassiou et al., this volume; Konidaris et al., this volume; Thompson et al., this volume), therefore starting to fill this research gap of Eastern Europe during this crucial period of hominin migrations. CROSSROADS aimed to continue to fill this gap in the Early to Middle Pleistocene record by conducting multidisciplinary systematic fieldwork to locate stratified dateable contexts that promote the construction of a chronostratigraphic framework for this region of Eurasia. The Mygdonian Basin archaeological survey was therefore part of this effort and was conducted in 2019, 2021 and 2022 by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in collaboration with the University of Tübingen Paleoanthropology team, in the framework of CROSSROADS. The survey was a direct target-oriented double-intensive archaeological investigation of Pleistocene sediments, aiming to identify traces of human activity by systematically surveying exposed section profiles and by collecting lithic artifacts from stratified dateable contexts.