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<p>By the end of the Middle Pleistocene and into the early Late Pleistocene, the North African Middle Stone Age (NAMSA) saw the emergence and spread of tanging technology from the Atlantic seaboard to the Nile Valley, alongside the continued use of non-tanged artefacts. This paper examines the significance of tang production through a two-tier analysis of the César Tabelbala collection (<i>Institut de Paléontologie Humaine</i>, Paris), combining corpus-wide morphometrics with a techno-structural study of convergent tools. The results show that tanged artefacts occupy a narrower morphometric range and tend to be less elongated than non-tanged ones. At the organisational level, tangs are strongly associated with adjacent relations between prehensive and transformative units, whereas non-tanged artefacts are more often arranged in opposed configurations. This pattern is closely linked to elongation, while width and thickness remain comparatively stable. Tang production is therefore interpreted not as a fixed typological marker, but as one technical solution among others for reorganising the proximal part of the tool.</p>

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The Tang as a Technical Solution: A Morphometric and Techno-Structural View from the Tabelbala MSA Corpus

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年6月3日

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  • Nassim Zejly,
  • Amir Beshkani,
  • Stéphanie Bonilauri,
  • David Pleurdeau

摘要

By the end of the Middle Pleistocene and into the early Late Pleistocene, the North African Middle Stone Age (NAMSA) saw the emergence and spread of tanging technology from the Atlantic seaboard to the Nile Valley, alongside the continued use of non-tanged artefacts. This paper examines the significance of tang production through a two-tier analysis of the César Tabelbala collection (Institut de Paléontologie Humaine, Paris), combining corpus-wide morphometrics with a techno-structural study of convergent tools. The results show that tanged artefacts occupy a narrower morphometric range and tend to be less elongated than non-tanged ones. At the organisational level, tangs are strongly associated with adjacent relations between prehensive and transformative units, whereas non-tanged artefacts are more often arranged in opposed configurations. This pattern is closely linked to elongation, while width and thickness remain comparatively stable. Tang production is therefore interpreted not as a fixed typological marker, but as one technical solution among others for reorganising the proximal part of the tool.