Beregovo I

The site Beregovo I, south of the town of Beregovo, is located on a ridge, which was partly quarried away by industrial sand/gravel production. This is also how the site has been discovered. Nowadays, the quarry is no longer active and, hence, the site no longer endangered. Past excavations provided a large lithic collection, but very limited information on the number of levels, the stratigraphic position of the lithic artefacts, and no information on the environmental context.

Vitaly Usik cleaned a section and started excavating a small test-pit in 2006 and 2007. Since 2010 the current team has conducted several fieldwork seasons at the site to enlarge the original test-pit and to explore the potential of the site for future work. 

Up to now more than 20m2 have been excavated. Excavations employ piece-plotting of artefacts with total stations documenting their stratigraphic context and systematic wet-sieving of all excavated sediments. In total, we excavated more than 28,000 objects (piece-plotted and wet-sieving) from one archaeological horizon. 

The lithic artifacts point towards an Early Upper Palaeolithic assemblage. Raw materials include various cherts of different quality, andesite as well as quartz. Core reduction clearly points towards unidirectional blade and bladelet production. The bladelet production includes various special bladelet cores. Detailed attribute and refitting analyses are ongoing, preliminary results suggest a high refitting rate. Retouched tools include carinated/nosed endscrapers and abundant retouched bladelets, including Dufour bladelets subtype Dufour.

 

 

This project is a collaboration with Vitaly Usik (Museum of Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, Ukrainian Academy of Sciences). Further partners are: Larissa Kulakovska (Museum of Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, Ukrainian Academy of Sciences), Paul Haesaerts (Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences), Freddy Damblon (Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences), and Natasha Gerasimenko (University of Kyiv).

Selection of lithic artefacts.

Excavation at Beregovo I.

All images © by Philip R. Nigst and Vitaly Usik, unless otherwise stated.