The Qaraoun culture is a culture of the Lebanese

Stone Age The Stone Age was a broad prehistoric period during which stone was widely used to make tools with an edge, a point, or a percussion surface. The period lasted for roughly 3.4 million years, and ended between 4,000 BC and 2,000 BC, with ...

around

Qaraoun Qaraoun is a Lebanese village, 85 km from Beirut, known for its Lake Qaraoun in the Beqaa Valley formed by the El Wauroun Dam built in 1959. It is an ecologically fragile zone in the Western Beqaa District. The village lies about 800 m abov ...

in the

Beqaa Valley The Beqaa Valley ( ar, links=no, وادي البقاع, ', Lebanese ), also transliterated as Bekaa, Biqâ, and Becaa and known in classical antiquity as Coele-Syria, is a fertile valley in eastern Lebanon. It is Lebanon's most important ...

. The Gigantolithic or Heavy Neolithic

flint Flint, occasionally flintstone, is a sedimentary cryptocrystalline form of the mineral quartz, categorized as the variety of chert that occurs in chalk or marly limestone. Flint was widely used historically to make stone tools and start ...

tool industry of this culture was recognized as a particular

Neolithic The Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, is an Old World archaeological period and the final division of the Stone Age. It saw the Neolithic Revolution, a wide-ranging set of developments that appear to have arisen independently in several pa ...

variant of the Lebanese highlands by

Henri Fleisch Reverend Father Henri Fleisch (1 January 1904 – 10 February 1985) was a French archaeologist, missionary and Orientalist, known for his work on classical Arabic language and Lebanese dialect and prehistory in Lebanon. Fleisch spent years rec ...

, who collected over one hundred flint tools within two hours on 2 September 1954 from the site. Fleisch discussed the discoveries with

Alfred Rust Alfred Rust (July 4, 1900 – August 14, 1983) was a German prehistoric archaeologist. Though self-taught, he became a pioneer in the study of the Hamburgian culture of the late Paleolithic, especially through his excavations in northern Germany. ...

and Dorothy Garrod, who confirmed the culture to have Neolithic elements. Garrod said that the Qaraoun culture ''"in the absence of all stratigraphical evidence may be regarded as

mesolithic The Mesolithic ( Greek: μέσος, ''mesos'' 'middle' + λίθος, ''lithos'' 'stone') or Middle Stone Age is the Old World archaeological period between the Upper Paleolithic and the Neolithic. The term Epipaleolithic is often used synonymo ...

proto-neolithic Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) denotes the first stage of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, in early Levantine and Ancient Anatolians, Anatolian Neolithic culture, dating to years ago, that is, 10,000–8,800 BCE. Archaeological remains are located in ...

"''.Henri., Nouvelles stations préhistoriques au Liban, Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Française, vol. 51, pp. 564-565, 1954.
/ref> (5,000 to 20,000 years

Before Present Before Present (BP) years, or "years before present", is a time scale used mainly in archaeology, geology and other scientific disciplines to specify when events occurred relative to the origin of practical radiocarbon dating in the 1950s. Beca ...

References

{{Reflist Mesolithic cultures of Asia Neolithic cultures of Asia Archaeological cultures of West Asia Archaeological cultures in Lebanon