Hunter-gatherers of the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic Levant. The state of the art of the functional perspective

This chapter presents an overview of the functional studies applied to the toolkit of the Levant communities prior to the Upper Palaeolithic. Despite the enormous chronological span and the broad geographical area comprised by “the Levant”, a functional approach being applied to mineral and organic toolkits, is nowadays quite rare. Surveys and excavations have extended our knowledge of the oldest occurrence of hunter-gatherers in the area (Enzel and Bar-Yosef 2017 and references therein); nevertheless, the functional approach is not yet as widespread as the typological and technological approaches.