Pech de l'Azé II

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Pech II was discovered by Bordes in 1948, thanks to the fact that some of the talus of the site had been cut away in the construction of a rail line that ran parallel to the cliff at this point. He excavated there from 1949 to 1951 and again from 1967-1969. Both outside the mouth of the cave (locality Pech IIb) and within the cave itself (Pech IIa) an occupational sequence began with the so-called Meridional Acheulian, followed by a variety of Mousterian industries (Bordes 1972). Schwarcz and Blackwell (1983) published two U-series dates from Pech II and two from Pech I, and Grün et al. (1991) published a series of ESR dates based on 29 teeth from Pech II. Both sets of dates give a consistent picture, though the ESR dates provide more detail. More recently, OSL dates (Jacobs et al. 2016) suggest ranges from 100 – 55 ka for the upper ensemble (layers 2G1 to 4D) and roughly 180 – 140 ka for the lower ensemble (layers 7 – 9).