Abstract: Nahal dimona 24 (ND24) and Dimona South (DS) are two Middle Paleolithic (MP) sites recently excavated in the arid Negev region, southern Israel. The discovery of these two sites allows us to revisit some long-held views of the Centripetal and Nubian Levallois knapping modes and their role in the MP world Levant and neighboring regions.

It is widely accepted that most MP lithic assemblages from the southern Levant conform to a general classification of Levantine Mousterian, characterized by Levallois technology, and shows similar typology to the European ‘typical Mousterian’ (Bar-Yosef, 2006). Hence, most of the known lithic variability is manifested in the frequency of the combinations of different methods and modes of production (e.g. the Levallois preferential or recurrent production methods and unidirectional, bidirectional or centripetal modes for shaping the core flaking surface). Within this framework, dominance of centripetal Levallois knapping mode is still frequently associated with MIS 5 chronology. Recently, it was associated with both the migration of modern humans out of Africa (Blinkhorn et al. 2021) as well as with a newly defined human population in the Levant (Zaidner et al. 2021). At the same time, Nubian Levallois technology is in the center of an  ongoing debate not only about its role as a cultural marker for human expansions but also its existence as a defined technological phenomenon (e.g. Groucutt 2020; Blinkhorn et al. 2021; Hallinan et al. 2022; Blinkhorn et al. 2022). The appearance of Nubian technology in the Levant was first reported only in recent years (Goder-Goldberger et al.,2016, 2017), and its low frequencies and sporadic appearance lead to the interpretation of diffusion of cultural ideas, rather than human migration (Goder-Goldberger et al. 2016). 

In this talk I will try to challenge and debate some of these old and new ideas based on new evidence from several projects in the Negev, focusing on the lithic assemblage from the two sites of ND24 and DS.