In the elephant, everything is good: Carcass use and re-use at Castel di Guido (Italy)

摘要

Castel di Guido is a typical Middle Pleistocene elephant site where intentionally fragmented bones of elephant and of other large mammals were found together with Acheulean biface-like industry, including bifaces made of various stone types and of elephant bone, associated with flint tools on pebbles and flakes. Following a first interpretation of the evidence, the site represented a single and short phase of use, and elephants, horses, aurochs and few other species were killed and butchered on site, or partly brought to the site to be butchered after having been killed elsewhere. The bones were intentionally fractured for marrow extraction and left to "season" before being used as raw material for artefact production. Further evidence deriving from more recent studies suggests that the site lasted for much longer time and is in fact an intricate palimpsest of several phases of human use and partial reworking.