ABSTRACT
The Punung area has long been an attractive region for the prehistorian, whether working on ‘recent’ or ‘ancient’ prehistory. Great figures of Indonesian Archaeology worked all around Punung, and one can read a good historical review of their work in A.J. Bemet Kempers. More recent studies of the evolution of the central part of Java during the Quaternary confirmed the occurrence, near the Lower-Middle Pleistocene boundary, of some dramatic volcano-tectonic activity involving an uplift of the ranges surrounding the Solo Depression. Two stalagmitic floors were sampled in an inner room of the Tabuhan karstic net, which proved to date back to the middle part of the Upper Pleistocene. Two measurements were carried out on samples taken in Song Terus, whose general features and stratigraphy will be described in the next section. The sedimentary karstic and fluviatile filling of the caves began at least several hundred thousand years ago, at a period when Homo erectus surely still roamed on Java.
