in the first half of the twentieth century, knowledge of North African prehistory was extended by the work of Sandford and Arkell (1929, 1933, 1939) in the Nile Valley, gertrude caton-thompson (1934) at Kharga Oasis in Egypt, and charles mcburney and R. W. Hey (1955) in Cyrenaica in what is now eastern Libya.

Initial work in the Near East was carried out by Godefroy Zumoffen between 1897 and 1900, and he was followed by Henry Neuville (1934, 1951) and Francis Turville-Petre (1932). However, the most significant excavations were by Neuville, Stékelis, and dorothy garrod (Garrod and Bate 1937) at Skhul, el-Wad, and et-Tabun in Israel.

In 1926, louis s. leakey began research in the Rift Valley of Africa for sites. In his Stone Age Cultures of Kenya Colony (1931) Leakey used European terminology to describe the African industries. Astley John Hilary Goodwin and Clarence Van Riet Lowe (1929) developed the first lasting African terminology based on their assessment of archaeological materials on the terraces of the Vaal River valley. They introduced the classic tripartite sequence of early, middle, and late Stone Age, which was applied widely in Africa during the 1930s and 1940s (Fagan 1981). However, Europe, not Africa, was seen as the source for new ideas. The Sahara acted as a significant barrier preventing movement from south to north and allowing only “higher” cultures to move north to south (Deacon 1990).

Parallel Phyla after World War II

Explanation for change according to the parallel phyla scheme was found in diffusion and migration, sometimes leading to quite dramatic explanations for supposed major changes in the artifact record. A species difference, for instance, was proposed to account for the change from the Mousterian to the initial Upper Paleolithic by both Burkitt in 1933 and Leakey in 1934 (Isaac 1972b).

After World War II, the French archaeologist françois bordes and his colleague Maurice Bourgon developed a new approach to the description, analysis, and interpretation of Lower and Middle Paleolithic artifact assemblages. This approach, which was to become enormously influential (Bordes 1950; Bordes and Bourgon 1951), separated the description of an artifact assemblage from the description of the artifacts it contained and distinguished the description of artifact forms from the description of the techniques involved in their production. The Bordes approach thus removed the circularity inherent in the work of Breuil and Peyrony, who had relied on certain diagnostic artifact types (type fossils) to simultaneously describe the content of an assemblage and assign it a position in an evolutionary scheme (Sackett 1981). Although developed initially to describe French Lower and Middle Paleolithic assemblages, Bordes’s approach soon became the accepted method for characterizing assemblages from other parts of Europe as well as those from North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

Bordes used a common set of attributes to describe sixty-three different tool types that were recurring features of Middle Paleolithic assemblages. These attributes included the location of the retouched edges on the tool blank, the type of retouch applied to those edges, the number of retouched edges, and their shapes (Bordes 1961a, 1961b). The great majority of artifacts recovered from Lower and Middle Paleolithic sites could be classified using this typological scheme.

There are several reasons for the rapid and widespread acceptance of Bordes’s methodology. First, the classificatory scheme on which it was based proved applicable to Lower and Middle Paleolithic artifact assemblages from many different contexts in many different regions. Second, artifact assemblages were not characterized solely on the basis of a few, apparently diagnostic, tool types. Third, the methodology facilitated comparisons between assemblages. Not only were they described using the same set of tool types, but Bordes introduced a simple statistical method for describing the composition of artifact assemblages that showed how the percentage frequency of each tool type found in an assemblage altered in response to changes in the percentage frequencies. Fourth, because it provided a way of examining spatial and temporal variation in the co-occurrence of artifact