Middle Palaeolithic toolstone procurement behaviors at Lusakert Cave 1, Hrazdan valley, Armenia Ellery Frahm a, b, * , Joshua M. Feinberg a, b , Beverly A. Schmidt-Magee c , Keith N. Wilkinson d , Boris Gasparyan e , Benik Yeritsyan e , Daniel S. Adler c a Department of Anthropology, University of Minnesota, 30119th Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55455, United States b Institute for Rock Magnetism, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Minnesota, 310 Pillsbury Drive SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, United States c Department of Anthropology, Old World Archaeology Program, University of Connecticut, 354 Mansfield Road, Unit 1176, Storrs, CT 06269, United States d Department of Archaeology, University of Winchester, Sparkford Road, Winchester SO22 4NR, United Kingdom e Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, National Academy of Sciences,15 Charents Street, Yerevan, Armenia article info Article history: Received 31 May 2015 Accepted 16 October 2015 Available online xxx Keywords: Palaeolithic archaeology Lithic raw material procurement Provisioning strategies Southern Caucasus Obsidian sourcing Rock magnetic characterization abstract Strategies employed by Middle Palaeolithic hominins to acquire lithic raw materials often play key roles in assessing their movements through the landscape, relationships with neighboring groups, and cognitive abilities. It has been argued that a dependence on local resources is a widespread characteristic of the Middle Palaeolithic, but how such behaviors were manifested on the landscape remains unclear. Does an abundance of local toolstone reflect frequent encounters with different outcrops while foraging, or was a particular outcrop favored and preferentially quarried? This study examines such behaviors at a finer geospatial scale than is usually possible, allowing us to investigate hominin movements through the landscape surrounding Lusakert Cave 1 in Armenia. Using our newly developed approach to obsidian magnetic characterization, we test a series of hypotheses regarding the locations where hominins pro- cured toolstone from a volcanic complex adjacent to the site. Our goal is to establish whether the cave's occupants procured local obsidian from preferred outcrops or quarries, secondary deposits of obsidian nodules along a river, or a variety of exposures as encountered while moving through the river valley or across the wider volcanic landscape during the course of foraging activities. As we demonstrate here, it is not the case that one particular outcrop or deposit attracted the cave occupants during the studied time intervals. Nor did they acquire obsidian at random across the landscape. Instead, our analyses support the hypothesis that these hominins collected obsidian from outcrops and exposures throughout the adjacent river valley, reflecting the spatial scale of their day-to-day foraging activities. The coincidence of such behaviors within the resource-rich river valley suggests efficient exploitation of a diverse biome during a time interval immediately preceding the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic “transition,” the nature and timing of which has yet to be determined for the region. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The strategies employed by Middle Palaeolithic (MP) hominins to fulfill their toolstone needs, including the occurrence or absence of specialized procurement or quarrying locations, have previously been discussed in terms of their movements through the landscape, social relationships with neighboring groups, and cognitive abili- ties, such as foresight behind the use and production of stone tools (e.g., Marks, 1988; Roebroeks et al., 1988). Such appraisals have, in turn, been incorporated into debates considering whether MP hominins had fundamentally different behaviors or abilities than modern humans (e.g., Mithen, 1994, 1996a,b; Klein, 1995, 2000; Mellars, 1996a,b; Pettitt, 1997, 2000; Kolen, 1999; Tattersall, 1999), or whether their behaviors are essentially indistinguish- able from modern humans once variations within social and ecological conditions are taken into account (e.g., Grayson and Delpech, 2003; Adler et al., 2006; Shea, 2011; Hopkinson et al., 2013). Many of these assessments remain primarily based on an extensive corpus of research on chert procurement in southwestern France (e.g., Larick, 1986, 1987; Geneste, 1988, 1989a,b, 1990; Turq, * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: frah0010@umn.edu, elleryfrahm@gmail.com (E. Frahm). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Human Evolution journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhevol http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2015.10.008 0047-2484/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Journal of Human Evolution 91 (2016) 73e92