New late Upper Paleolithic site in northern Central Asia

In this paper we present the results of two years (2016 and 2017) excavations at new stratified Upper Paleolithic site of Ushbulak, situated in Shiliktinskaia Valley, Eastern Kazakhstan. There are eight lithological layers, which contain the archaeological material from Holocene to Initial Upper Paleolithic. The most significant number of artifacts was discovered in the layers 6 and 7. The debitage assemblages from these layers represent primary knapping oriented towards blade production by parallel uniand bidirectional methods of volumetric core reduction. The tool assemblage includes several types, such as end-scrappers, burins on blades, truncated-faceted pieces, and points with basal trimming, bitruncated blades and burin-cores. These features together with a date 45.249-44.012 cal.BP from layer 6 allow us to attribute these two layers 6 and 7 to the Initial Upper Paleolithic and to consider Eastern Kazakhstan as a region between synchronous sites of the Initial Upper Paleolithic in Altai Mountains, Dzungaria and Mongolia. (C) 2019 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.