Bitumen as Hafting Material on Middle Paleolithic Artifacts from the El Kowm Basin, Syria

Abstract

The El Kowm basin in Central Syria is located between the Palmyra basin and the valley of the Euphrates River (Figure 1). It is a depression 25 km wide and 80 km long, dominated to the east by Jabal Bicheri (rising to 850 m above sea level) and to the south by Jabal Minshar (879 m) and Jabal Mqaibara (1110 m). Running down the center of this natural basin is an elongated plateau, the Qdeir plateau, carved out by Quaternary erosion (Figure 2). During surveys in 1978 directed by T. Fujimoto (1979) and J. Cauvin (Cauvin et al. 1979), numerous lithic assemblages were discovered in the backdirt of many ancient wells situated on the periphery of the plateau or on the surface of tells. Since that time, two Middle Paleolithic sites have been excavated. One is the site of Hummal, situated on the plateau 3 km from the tell of El Kowm (Hours 1982; Le Tensorer and Hours 1989); the other is the site of Umm El Tlel, located on the northern slope of the Qdeir plateau (Molist et al. 1988; Boeda and Muhesen 1993). Among the material collected at these two sites, we identified 16 artifacts, 15 flint and one limestone, which showed traces of a black substance on one or more surfaces. On

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