al, 1928, 58) noted that many forms of tools, and especially the bone tool industry, bore little or no resemblance to the known Aurignacian assemblages while Romer (1928) concluded that the crania from Mechta El Arbi were related to neither Neanderthal nor Cro-Magnon beings but were likely ancestors of modern North Africans.

Pond did not make many statements concerning European and African relationships. However, based on his study of museum collections in Italy, his reading of Raymond Vaufrey’s (1928) study of the Italian Paleolithic, and the work of louis leakey, Pond did hypothesize that man originated in Africa and entered Europe via either the Nile Valley and the Near East or the Sahara and Spain. He argued that Collie’s hypothesis of movement of the Aurignacian culture across a land bridge from Tunisia to Italy was not supported by stone tools found at Italian sites. It was the study of this material that subsequently lead Vaufrey to work in North Africa and refute the Aurignacian-Capsian connection.

Vaufrey was a student of the great French archaeologist marcellin boule (see Roubet 1979), who had a strong interest in paleontological evidence for Pleistocene land bridges across the Mediterranean. Boule sent Vaufrey first to Italy and then, in 1927, to North Africa to search for animal and stone tool evidence for such connections. Vaufrey quickly demonstrated the lack of evidence for an Italian-Tunisian land bridge and went on to complete a comparative study of archaeological materials from southern Tunisia and eastern Algeria, often with the collaboration of Gobert. Between 1931 and 1933, Vaufrey tested a large number of sites throughout this region (Vaufrey 1955), often excavating in small units down to sterile soil or bedrock and screening all deposits (Roubet 1979, 29). The resulting collection was then selected with a bias in favor of formal retouched tools. In 1933, he published an article in L’Anthropologie that provided the standard interpretation of the Capsian for the next thirty years.

Vaufrey divided the Capsian into a chronological sequence from typical Capsian to Capsian superior to Neolithic in the Capsian tradition. The typical Capsian was characterized by numerous backed blades, lateral burins, endscrapers, backed bladelets, and varying amounts of geometric microliths and microburins. The major characteristic of Capsian superior was the marked decrease in the number of large tools and a great increase in the number and variety of microlithic tools, especially geometrics. Vaufrey created two facies, the “intergétulo-néolithique” of Tunisia (elongated scalene triangles and truncations) and the “Capsien supérieur typique” in Algeria (triangles and equilateral trapezes). Both facies contained a more varied and abundant bone industry than that found in the typical Capsian. The Neolithic in the Capsian tradition was characterized by the complete disappearance of most typical Capsian elements, a reduction of the number of geometric forms, and the introduction of bifacial points. Vaufrey concluded that from a typological viewpoint, the Capsian had a Mesolithic, or at most a final Paleolithic, character and that it was not ancestral to the Aurignacian period.

In addition to defining the industries and providing a temporal framework, Vaufrey formalized knowledge concerning the geographical distribution of the Capsian. He noted that the typical Capsian was confined to the region south of Tebessa in Algeria and Tunisia while the Capsian superior spread throughout the Constantine plains and south to the northern edge of the Sahara. This is essentially the distribution known today (Camps 1974, 117). In 1955, Vaufrey published his synthesis, Préhistoire de l’Afrique, the first book of which is entitled Le Maghreb. In addition to a wealth of data and interpretations on all periods, Chapter 2 of this work presents an excellent summary of the history of archaeological research in the Maghreb up to the 1950s.

Vaufrey subsequently focused his interest on the portable and rock art of the Maghreb and attempted to develop a chronology for rock art and investigate the relationship between artifacts from the Capsian and those of neighboring regions, notably Egypt and Spain (Roubet 1979, 42–46). Noting a resemblance between the Neolithic in the Capsian tradition and many other industries throughout Africa, he postulated a spread of the former throughout Africa.