News from the north-east fringe of Neanderthal Europe

News from the north-east fringe of Neanderthal Europe: recent work at Khotylevo 1 (Bryansk Oblast, Russia) 
Alexander Ocherednoi, Leonid Vishnyatsky, Ekaterina Voskresenskaya & Pavel Nehoroshev

Figure 3/6. Khotylevo 1, trench 6-2, eastern profile...

Khotylevo 1, situated on the right bank of the River Desna some 10km north-west of Bryansk (N53^o25', E34^o07'; Figure 1) is one of the northernmost Middle Palaeolithic (MP) sites in Europe and one of the richest in Eastern Europe. Excavated in the 1960s by F.M. Zavernyaev from the Bryansk Regional Museum, the site yielded thousands of flint artefacts, including numerous bifacial tools associated with a number of stratified contexts (Zavernyaev 1978). The chronology and depositional history of these contexts, however, remained unclear. As a result, in 2009, the Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences resumed fieldwork at Khotylevo 1 and neighbouring MP sites (Betovo and Korshevo). Following publication of the project’s preliminary results (Ocherednoi et al. 2014), we have obtained important new evidence for Khotylevo 1, including AMS radiocarbon dates and some highly diagnostic flint tools, shedding important light on both the age and nature of the MP assemblages. [...]  journal.antiquity.ac.uk