SESSION 2 – Ancient lithic trade and economics
New data concerning “large blades” in Catalonia: Apt-Forcalquier flint in the Gran Penedès (South of Barcelona) during the final Neolithic and Chalcolithic

The study of large flint blades documented in funerary contexts from the Late Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age in the north-eastern part of Iberia has been addressed in recent works by the authors in which 49 burial sites have been registered (caves, rock shelters and megalithic tombs) with more than 200 large flint blades.

In this paper we will present the recent data obtained from the study of five archaeological sites located in the historical region of the Penedès (south-west of Barcelona). The macroscopic characterization of the knapped stone industries shows their great variety regarding the origin of the siliceous raw material, often coming from outside the analysed region. In some cases their macroscopic features link them to Apt-Forcalquier flint (Provence, ), which was widely distributed in the form of large blades during these phases of Late Catalan prehistory. The absence of evidence of the chaine opératoire production of this type of flint in the lithic assemblages in Catalonia lead us to suppose that the dispersion of the blades was done as trade items, and only in a few cases were highly complex technological tools of this kind of raw material distributed (e.g., knives).