North Africa prior to the French Tardenoisian period, and he concluded that the richness of the Maghreb Aurignacian confirmed the African origin of the Aurignacian period in general (Reygasse 1922, 194–203). This position was difficult to refute without dating sites, but work along these lines was being undertaken as early as 1910 by Eugène G. Gobert in Tunisia.

Gobert, one of the foremost avocational archaeologists working in the Maghreb, was a medical doctor in Gafsa. He followed De Morgan’s view that the Capsian bore no necessary relationship to the French Aurignacian (Gobert 1910, 595), and working within the geological paradigm of French archaeology, he began to systematically excavate sites and develop a regional chronology based on rock-shelter stratigraphy and interassemblage comparison. He observed that virtually all Capsian sites in southern Tunisia contained geometric microliths when the deposits were screened. Therefore, if geometrics were a fossil directeur, or marker fossil, Capsian assemblages should all be Holocene (i.e., Tardenoisian) in age. Gobert attributed the rarity of geometrics in the sites investigated by Debruge to poor excavation techniques, a view not entirely substantiated by later reinvestigations at Mechta el Arbi (Balout 1955, 380).

Gobert (1910, 595) also argued that Capsian sites contained a warm vertebrate fauna of zebra, ox, antelope, and ostrich, which, since it was little different from the fauna associated with Neolithic sites, indicated a similar age. This argument was countered by the diffusionists, who invoked a less severe climate for North Africa during the Upper Paleolithic, owing to its more southerly latitude. It was into this atmosphere of controversy that the U.S. Logan Museum at Beloit College in Wisconsin launched a North African program of research through contacts with members of the diffusionist school. In 1925, Alonzo Pond visited Reygasse in Tebessa and then joined a Franco-American expedition on its trip south to Tammanrasset in central Sahara.

With Dubruge’s official guidance, Pond began excavating at Mechta El Arbi in 1926 and then worked on the Mediterranean coast in 1927 and in eastern Algeria in 1929; finally, with a contingent of fourteen American students, he conducted a three-month campaign of excavation on the southern edge of the Constantine plain near Canrobert (now Oum el Bouaghi) in the Aïn Beïda region in 1930. The research methods used during these expeditions were models for their time (Lubell 1992; Sheppard 1990, 1992) as they included systematic survey, surface collection, accurate measurement and plotting of sites on topographic maps (including an identifying number for each), excavation by arbitrary levels, and screening of all excavated deposit through a very fine mesh (Pond, Chapius, Romer, and Baker 1938). In addition to the quantitative study of all the stone tools recovered, the Logan Museum expeditions were also exceptional for the recovery and detailed identification of faunal and human remains, studies of modern snail populations, and sufficient conservation of charcoal samples that, fifty years later, they provided reasonable carbon–14 dates (Sheppard 1984). The standards of research and publication set by Pond were unequaled by North African archaeologists for another twenty years.

Using faunal data and the prevailing understanding of glacial climates, Pond’s colleague Collie (1928) argued that North Africa provided a suitable environment for the early development of the Aurignacian culture during the Würm Glacial period prior to the diffusion of the Aurignacian to Europe. Differences between the lithic assemblages of Europe and North Africa were assumed by Collie to reflect either divergence after movement to Europe or the advanced features of the original culture in Africa (Collie 1928, 45). Although Collie described the Aurignacian tool types, he did not attempt any detailed numerical comparison of North African and French assemblages. It is apparent that regardless of poor chronology and limited data, Collie thought he had a rather compelling argument for the origin in North Africa of the French Upper Paleolithic culture.

If Collie was the grand theoretician, Pond was the methodical field-worker concerned with the practical problems of describing and comparing archaeological assemblages. Pond (et