Iovita Radu, Rendu William, Lindauer Susanne, Taimagambetov Zhaken, Kushch Galina A, Baryshnikov Gennady F
Department of Geosciences, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
Center for the Study of Human Origins, Department of Anthropology, New York University, New York, NY USA.
J Paleolit Archaeol. 2024;7(1):21. doi: 10.1007/s41982-024-00187-x. Epub 2024 Jul 16.
The Altai mountains contain a number of cave and rockshelter sites that have given crucial information about human evolution in Asia. Most of these caves are located in the Gornyi Altai of Siberia, while the southern flank of the range remains much less known. Bukhtarma Cave was a karstic cave located near the former village of Peshchera, on the banks of the Bukhtarma River running through the foothills of the southern (Kazakh) Altai mountains. The Soviet East Kazakhstan Archaeological Expedition carried several excavation campaigns in the cave in the early to mid 1950s, discovering Paleolithic stone tools as well as animal bones. The collections were split between the East Kazakhstan Regional Museum of Local History in Öskemen (the lithic and part of the faunal collection) and the Zoological Institute in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) (most of the fauna). Subsequently, the site was flooded by the construction of the Bukhtarma Reservoir in 1958, such that further fieldwork is impossible. However, in 2020, we reanalyzed the zooarchaeological collections and obtained several C dates. Based on the excavation documentation and the newly obtained dates exclusively taken from cut marked and carnivore-modified bone, we reconstruct at least three Paleolithic archaeological horizons, spanning the time between ca. 47-30 ka cal BP and exhibiting Middle and Upper Paleolithic characteristics, as well as the remains of several Holocene occupations, the latest of which dates to the Bronze Age. We present here a summary of the lithic and faunal assemblage and draw general conclusions about the site's placement within the regional Paleolithic.
阿尔泰山脉有许多洞穴和岩厦遗址，这些遗址提供了有关亚洲人类进化的关键信息。这些洞穴大多位于西伯利亚的戈尔诺-阿尔泰地区，而山脉的南侧则鲜为人知。布赫塔尔马洞穴是一个岩溶洞穴，位于佩什切拉旧村附近，在流经南（哈萨克）阿尔泰山麓的布赫塔尔马河畔。20世纪50年代初至中期，苏联东哈萨克斯坦考古考察队在该洞穴进行了几次发掘活动，发现了旧石器时代的石器以及动物骨骼。这些藏品被分别存放在鄂木斯克的东哈萨克斯坦地方历史区域博物馆（石器和部分动物群藏品）和列宁格勒（现圣彼得堡）的动物研究所（大部分动物群藏品）。随后，由于1958年布赫塔尔马水库的建设，该遗址被淹没，因此无法进行进一步的实地考察。然而，在2020年，我们重新分析了动物考古学藏品并获得了几个碳年代测定数据。基于发掘记录以及专门从有切割痕迹和食肉动物改造痕迹的骨骼上获取的新数据，我们重建了至少三个旧石器时代考古层位，其年代跨度约为公元前47000年至30000年，具有中石器时代和旧石器时代晚期的特征，以及几个全新世居住遗迹，其中最晚的可追溯到青铜时代。我们在此呈现石器和动物群组合的总结，并就该遗址在区域旧石器时代中的位置得出一般性结论。
