A Newly Dated Late Pleistocene and Holocene Archaeological Assemblage from Bukhtarma Cave in the Southern Altai Piedmont, East Kazakhstan

Abstract

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 14C 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.