POTENTIAL SOURCES OF RAW MATERIALS USED FOR TOOLS IN PALEOLITHIC ROCKSHELTER CRVENA STIJENA, MONTENEGRO

The Crvena Stijena rockshelter is located on the Banjani Karst Plateau in westernmost Montenegro. It houses one of the longest human occupation sequences in the Balkans, from Marine Isotope Stage 6 to the Holocene. The Paleolithic deposits contain numerous stone tools made and used by Neanderthals. Understanding where they procured the stone for their tools helps us understand how they utilized their environment for ~100 kya. The Banjani Karst Plateau is a part of the Adriatic Carbonate Platform which consists of shallow water limestones and dolomites deposited in the central Tethys during Mesozoic Era. Bordering the Adriatic Carbonate Platform on the south side is the Budva Zone geotectonic unit, which represents Mesozoic Era deep water deposits of bedded chert, siliceous shales and pelagic limestones that contain nodular chert. Field work in early June 2022 focused on investigations of early Jurassic shallow water carbonate rocks from Adriatic Carbonate Platform and Triassic-Cretaceous deep water bedded chert and pelagic limestones from the Budva Zone, both south of Crvena Stijena. At three localities, Vilusi, Bojanje Brdo, and Ledenice, all within the Adriatic Carbonate Platform, Lower Jurassic (Liassic) limestones (mudstones by Dunham’s classification) contain mostly oblate chert nodules that vary in size from 10 to 50 cm, and color, from dark gray, bluish gray, mottled light gray to white. Chert nodules appear either in tan or bluish limestones. Some nodules have distinct boundaries with host rocks while others exhibit whitish rinds. Two localities in Budva Zone, Verige and Gornja Lastva near Tivat in coastal Montenegro were also examined. Bedded chert from Budva Zone appears in thin (1-10 cm) beds intercalated with thin (0.5-2 cm) siliceous shales. Bedded chert is reddish, greenish or grayish in color. Thinly bedded (5-15 cm) pelagic limestones from Budva Zone also contain nodular chert that in places extends for several meters within limestones. Both nodular chert and bedded chert are intruded by calcite veins which makes them very brittle and with flat rather than conchoidal fractures. XRD and thin section analyses of collected chert samples will be compared with composition of the artefacts from Crvena Stijena to determine whether occupants of Crvena Stijena used these raw materials for making their tools.