Maria Gurova

The Human Fossil Record of Bulgaria and the Formulation of Biogeographic Hypotheses

The location of Bulgaria on the Balkan Peninsula makes it potentially important for evaluating biogeographic hypotheses related to human evolution. The country lies at the crossroads of Europe and Asia Minor and constitutes a key portion of one of the possible dispersal pathways that hominin populations would have employed as they entered and left Europe during the Pleistocene. Unfortunately, the Pleistocene human fossil record of Bulgaria is sparse, and perhaps more importantly, the specific biogeographic hypotheses that human fossil discoveries might address could be more fully articulated. In this chapter, we review the fossil hominins currently known from Bulgaria and discuss the framing of biogeographic hypotheses.

Investigating the provenance of obsidian from Neolithic and Chalcolithic sites in Bulgaria

Portable energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) has become a widely used tool for the chemical characterisation (source identification) of obsidian found in archaeological contexts. While laboratory techniques such as neutron activation analysis (NAA) and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) can analyse more elements and have lower detection limits, pXRF can provide quantitative data of sufficient resolution to be able to match obsidian artefacts with their volcanic sources. At the same time, pXRF offers several advantages for obsidian research: (i) it can be deployed ‘in the field’ (i.e. on site or in a museum) without the need to bring samples back to a laboratory for analysis; (ii) information on elemental composition can be obtained relatively quickly; and (iii) measurements require no special preparation of samples and cause no visible damage to materials.