Old and new on the same site: Putting Vale da Pedra Furada into a wider context. A comment to Lahaye et al. 2015

A recent paper on Vale da Pedra Furada (VPF, Lahaye et al., this journal), a final Pleistocene archaeological site of Northeastern Brazil (VPF), while comparing to some other sites in the region, fails to refere to the very close rock-shelter of Boqueirao da Pedra Furada (BPF), the main reference, and controversial, site of lowland South America. Because I studied exhaustively this last, I provide some explanations both on stratigraphic, taphonomic and palaeoclimatic grounds, pointing to a more careful intra-site analysis of such a critical archaeological area. Both VPF and BPF are two parts of the same site: in fact, VPF correlates with the youngest Pleistocene layer of BPF, Pedra Furada 3 (26-18 cal ky BP) but also seems to fill the gap between the last millennia of final Pleistocene and the onsent of Holocenic conditions. A tight ressemblance of archaological features is underlined as long as analogies and differences regarding taphonomic analysis of the artifacts between the two sectors.