The Micro-burin in the Spanish Levant

Extract

Since the studies of Vignard brought the micro-burin, the presence of which Siret had already noted at El Garcel, into fashion as an Upper Palaeolithic tool of unknown purpose, there has been much discussion of this tiny and enigmatic object.

I confess that I paid little attention to it when I visited the collection of M. Vignard in Paris 25 years ago. He showed me his micro-burins from the Sebilian and, after hearing my account of the finds at Parpalló, predicted that I should find examples among the flints from that site, which I was then in process of classifying. And, in fact, a few months later I found the first example, a very fine and characteristic one, in the third Magdalenian level. Other examples followed from similar levels, and later, when we were classifying the flint from the Solutrean levels, we discovered to our surprise that they were also present there. Since then they have continued to appear on other sites, so that it seems worth while to summarize here the data which we now possess about them.

Let us look at the situation in the deposits which I have studied.

In the cave of Parpalló they are found in appreciable numbers at two points in the typological evolution. From a depth of 5.25 m. upwards, that is during the phases which I have named Upper Solutrean and final Solutreo-gravettian, they are relatively abundant (about 50 examples).