The Problem of Cultural Variability of the Archaeological Assemblages of Final Pleistocene on the Lower Vitim

The paper is devoted to the problem of cultural variability of the archaeological assemblages of Final Pleistocene in Lower Vitim basin. The problem of cultural variability every time appears as the result of increasing the corpus of sites addressed to the same stage: the discovered differences among sites need to be explained. Such differences are recognized in terms of archaeological cultures, technical traditions, variants, lines of development. Often such schemes organized like binary oppositions. Explanation of the cultural variability raises from current and concurrent scientific paradigms. The question of the best argument being solved by development of the field works and increasing of the archaeological corpus as well as using the modern research methods and working in theory-methodological grounds. In lower part of Vitim basin there are about 20 archaeological assemblages of Final Pleistocene - Final Paleolithic belong within sites Avdeikha, Bol'shoi Yakor' I, Kovrizhka II-III, Mamakan VI. The most representative of them is Bol'shoi Yakor' I, 12,600-11,500 C BP. The Research of new assemblages on the back of the cultural horizons 9-3A of Bol'shoi Yakor' I comes to the problem of the cultural variability of the assemblages of the border of Pleistocene-Holocene. Cultural horizons 2 and 3 of Kovrizhka III (11,400-10,400 C BP) today are the most informative assemblages of Final Pleistocene typologically contrast to ones of Bol'shoi Yakor' I. During the last years of research both of Kovrizhka III and Bol'shoi Yakor' I we distinguished: a) dissimilarity recognized as two types of the industries adapted to different situations of occupance; b) longtime co-existence of both the types of the sites until in the 1 Half of Holocene; c) internal similarity of the artifact assemblages of Bol'shoi Yakor' I as well as ones of Kovrizhka III; d) the first arguments for the hypothesis of the origin of the prismatic microblade industry on the ground of local Paleolithic about 11,400-10,400 C BP. The case of delineating the two-three coexisting types of industries opposite to each other in some key characteristics is not isolated in Siberian Paleolithic. Understanding of the variability of industries is being in terms of ethno-cultural versus economical (adaptive-technical) reasons. Search of the arguments for one or another choice allows from cultural-historical approach to the application of modern methods of process archaeology.

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