of stone tools from sites in southern Tunisia, which they called Capsian. The stratigraphically lower assemblages contained large-backed blades, burins, and thick scrapers. The upper, or younger, assemblages were described as more refined, containing backed bladelets, small scrapers, fragments of engraved ostrich eggshell, and polished bone tools. Arguing that the Capsian took the place in North Africa of the European Upper Paleolithic, De Morgan proposed a subdivision: the more refined material was named Capsian superior, and the assemblage dominated by large tools was called Capsian inferior. This division, which essentially mirrors that of the modern Upper Capsian and typical Capsian persists today (Lubell, Sheppard and Jackes 1984).

Another early archaeologist was Paul Pallary, whose research in coastal caves and shelters resulted in the 1909 publication of Instructions pour les recherches préhistoriques dans le Nord-Ouest de l’Afrique. Pallary noted the similarity of the coastal North African lithics to Iberian materials that had been published earlier by Siret in Les premiers âges du métal dans le Sud-Est de l’Espagne (H. Siret and L. Siret 1887) and named the microlithic industry found in Maghreb coastal sites the Iberomaurusien. Based upon the “warm” fauna associated with this industry, Pallary thought that it must be later than the French Magdalenian, with its “cold” fauna, and that it therefore bridged the period between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic.

Attempts to correlate North African discoveries with those in Europe led to the formation of two schools. Members of the first, “the diffusionists,” rejected the importance of independent development and saw similarity in archaeological industries as evidence of direct contact and/or diffusion of ideas. Members of the other school saw the development of local chronology and the definition and description of sequences as being the matters of primary concern. The diffusionist argument was championed by Capitan who, in the 1910–1911 serial article, argued counter to De Morgan, that the similarity between the Aurignacian and the Capsian was probably evidence of an exchange of ideas or people across a Mediterranean land bridge (De Morgan, Capitan, and Boudy 1910– 1911, 226). The great French archaeologist henri breuil (1912, 183) agreed, stating that the Capsian was middle Aurignacian and might have influenced the development of the French Aurignacian by way of Spain, thus further bolstering Pallary’s ideas.

By correlating North African and French assemblages, the early Maghreb archaeologists hoped to develop a chronology for a regional sequence. Foremost among these archaeologists was Albert Debruge, a civil servant in the Algerian city of Constantine and an active member of the Constantine Archaeological Society, which charged him with responsibility for the excavation of Mechta El Arbi in eastern Algeria. From this site Debruge reported a lithic industry totally lacking in burins and geometric microliths and exhibiting what he thought were Mousterian affinities. He attributed the bone industry, which had no affinity with European materials, to intrusive Neolithic burials and made Mechta the type site for his “Aurignacien ancien” (Debruge 1923). Numerous human skeletons were studied by Bertholon, who concluded they were Neanderthaloid (Mercier and Debruge 1912). Considerable disagreement arose among the anthropologists, but all ultimately concurred that the skulls were not Neanderthal (Mercier 1915; Pond, et al. 1928).

Debruge found few geometric microliths in central Algerian sites, but further east, the numerous geometric microliths in the sites near Tebessa posed a problem for the Aurignacian school since they were not often found in the French Aurignacian period but rather in the post-Paleolithic Tardenoisian period (Coutil 1912). As a result, Debruge adopted a cautious stand on the Tebessa assemblages, a caution not exercised by Maurice Reygasse, principal administrator of the Commune Mixte of Tebessa and the most active archaeologist in that region. From 1917 on, Reygasse divided the Capsian of the Tebessa region into three Aurignacian civilizations (Reygasse 1920), the last being the Tardenoisien le plus pur (“the purest Tardenoisian”). For Reygasse, the abundance of geometrics that began in the middle Aurignacian period was evidence of the development of geometrics in