Broken Bones, Bone Expediency Tools, and Bone Pseudotools: Lessons from the Blast Zone around Mount St. Helens, Washington

1984 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Lee Lyman
Keyword(s):  
Stone Tools ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Bone Tools ◽  
Broken Bones ◽  
Patterns Of Use ◽  
Use Wear ◽  
Blast Zone ◽  
Mount St Helens ◽  
The Way

Criteria for recognizing technological and use-wear modifications have been used to identify “bone expediency tools” by archaeologists who analyze bone assemblages recovered from sites where butchering of animals took place. These criteria are here reviewed and then used to identify bone pseudotools in cervid bone assemblages completely formed by non-human processes and recovered from the blast zone around the Mount St. Helens volcano in Washington. The procedures for identifying stone tools and bone tools share similar strengths and weaknesses that seem to originate with the logical criteria used for recognizing modifications to the objects under study. Less equivocal inferential identifications of bone objects as “tools” can be facilitated by turning to the problem of constructing testable hypotheses about the way patterns of use-wear modifications to bone tools can be expected to appear in the archaeological record.

scholarly journals A sexual division of labour at the start of agriculture? A multi-proxy comparison through grave good stone tool technological and use-wear analysis

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. e0249130
Author(s):  
Alba Masclans ◽  
Caroline Hamon ◽  
Christian Jeunesse ◽  
Penny Bickle
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Violence ◽  
Stone Tools ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Stone Tool ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Sexual Division ◽  
Wear Analysis ◽  
Use Wear ◽  
Grave Good ◽  
East West

This work demonstrates the importance of integrating sexual division of labour into the research of the transition to the Neolithic and its social implications. During the spread of the Neolithic in Europe, when migration led to the dispersal of domesticated plants and animals, novel tasks and tools, appear in the archaeological record. By examining the use-wear traces from over 400 stone tools from funerary contexts of the earliest Neolithic in central Europe we provide insights into what tasks could have been carried out by women and men. The results of this analysis are then examined for statistically significant correlations with the osteological, isotopic and other grave good data, informing on sexed-based differences in diet, mobility and symbolism. Our data demonstrate males were buried with stone tools used for woodwork, and butchery, hunting or interpersonal violence, while women with those for the working of animal skins, expanding the range of tasks known to have been carried out. The results also show variation along an east-west cline from Slovakia to eastern France, suggesting that the sexual division of labour (or at least its representation in death) changed as farming spread westwards.

scholarly journals Bone-related behaviours performed by captive chimpanzees during an excavating experiment

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alba Motes Rodrigo ◽  
Travis R. Pickering ◽  
Claudio Tennie ◽  
R. Adriana Hernandez-Aguilar
Keyword(s):  
Stone Tools ◽  
The Other ◽  
Previous Experience ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Bone Tools ◽  
Behavioural Responses ◽  
Unique Source ◽  
Different Characteristics ◽  
Foraging Task

After stone tools, bone tools are the most abundant tool type in the hominin archaeological record. However, due to their poor preservation, they are relatively scarce, limiting our understanding of the behavioural processes that led to their production and use. Extant primates constitute a unique source of behavioural data to build and shape hypotheses about the potential uses that our hominin ancestors might have given to bone tools. In this study, we investigated the behavioural responses of two groups of captive chimpanzees (Ntotal=42) to detached and cleaned bones while participating in a foraging task aimed at eliciting excavating behavior. Each chimpanzee group was provided with bones of different characteristics and the two groups differed in their respective levels of experience with tool excavation (one group being mostly inexperienced while the other had ample experience in stick tool excavation). We found that several individuals from the inexperienced group used the provided bones as tools during the task. No individuals from the experienced group used bones as excavating tools. Instead, these chimpanzees performed other bone-related behaviours (not observed in the inexperienced group), such as hammering and tool-assisted marrow consumption. Given that previous experience in tool excavation did not predict the use of bones as tools in the excavating task, we hypothesize that the differences in behavior observed between the two chimpanzee groups were due to the characteristics of the bones they were provided with. Furthermore, our results suggest that object characteristics rather than material determine whether chimpanzees perceive an object as a suitable excavating tool.

Percussive-Abrasive Stone Tools from Chagyrskaya Cave: Results of Functional Analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 23-31
Author(s):  
M. V. Seletsky ◽  
A. Y. Fedorchenko ◽  
P. V. Chistyakov ◽  
S. V. Markin ◽  
K. A. Kolobova
Keyword(s):  
Raw Materials ◽  
Stone Tools ◽  
Lithic Assemblage ◽  
Wear Analysis ◽  
Use Wear ◽  
Experimental Use ◽  
Abrasive Stone ◽  
Source Of Information ◽  
Reference Samples ◽  
Comprehensive Study

This article presents a comprehensive study of percussive-abrasive active stone tools from Chagyrskaya Cave, using experimental use-wear and statistical methods, supplemented by 3D-modeling. Experiments combined with use- wear analysis allowed us to determine the functions of these tools by comparing the working surfaces and use-wear traces in the Chagyrskaya samples with those in the reference samples. As a result, we identified 19 retouchers, four hammerstones for processing mineral raw materials, and one hammer for splitting bone, which indicates the dominance of secondary processing over primary knapping in the Chagyrskaya lithic assemblage. Using statistical analysis, we traced the differences in the dimensions of the manuports and lithics under study. These artifacts are a promising and underestimated source of information for identifying working operations associated with stone- and bone-processing; moreover, they can provide new data on the functional attribution of sites and the mobility of early hominins.

Maintaining Relations with Deer

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher R. Moore ◽  
Richard W. Jefferies
Keyword(s):  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Southern Illinois ◽  
Green River ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
West Central ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Middle Archaic ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines the way deer were entangled in the everyday lives of Middle Archaic peoples. The authors first delve into hunter-gatherer ethnography, principally from northern hunting societies, and argue that hunting cultures are rarely extractive at their core. Rather, human-animal relations in hunting societies are better conceived as a meshwork of entanglements and mutual obligations. They also draw on the Middle Archaic archaeological record, focusing on the Black Earth site in southern Illinois and several Green River Archaic sites in west central Kentucky, to argue that white-tailed deer were extremely important to Middle Archaic hunters, not only as sources of food but also as social and spiritual creatures.

scholarly journals 4E cognition in the Lower Palaeolithic

2020 ◽  
pp. 105971232096718
Author(s):  
Thomas Wynn ◽  
Karenleigh A Overmann ◽  
Lambros Malafouris
Keyword(s):  
Stone Tools ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Technical Expertise ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cognitive Archaeology ◽  
4E Cognition ◽  
Thinking Process ◽  
Computational Processes ◽  
Lower Palaeolithic

This essay introduces a special issue focused on 4E cognition (cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) in the Lower Palaeolithic. In it, we review the typological and representational cognitive approaches that have dominated the past 50 years of paleoanthropology. These have assumed that all representations and computations take place only inside the head, which implies that the archaeological record can only be an “external” product or the behavioral trace of “internal” representational and computational processes. In comparison, the 4E approach helps us to overcome this dualist representational logic, allowing us to engage directly with the archaeological record as an integral part of the thinking process, and thus ground a more parsimonious cognitive archaeology. It also treats stone tools, the primary vestiges of hominin thinking, as active participants in mental life. The 4E approach offers a better grounding for understanding hominin technical expertise, a crucially important component of hominin cognitive evolution.

POINT COUNTER POINT: INTERPRETING CHIPPED CHERT BIFACES IN TERMINAL CLASSIC “PROBLEMATIC” ON-FLOOR DEPOSITS FROM STRUCTURES A2 AND A3 AT CAHAL PECH, BELIZE

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. James Stemp ◽  
Jaime J. Awe
Keyword(s):  
Stone Tools ◽  
Skeletal Remains ◽  
Classic Period ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
Terminal Phase ◽  
Ancient Maya ◽  
Terminal Classic ◽  
Use Wear ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Symbolic Meanings

AbstractProblematic deposits, containing different types of artifacts and skeletal remains, are typically recovered on or near the surfaces of the terminal phase of elite civic-ceremonial architecture at ancient Maya sites. These contexts often date to the Terminal Classic period (~a.d. 750–900). They have been variously interpreted as evidence for site abandonment, squatting, warfare, or dedication or termination rituals. Sixteen chert bifaces were recovered from problematic deposits at the bases of Structures A2 and A3 in the elite Plaza A at Cahal Pech, Belize. Stone tools from problematic deposits are rarely examined in significant detail. Based on stylistic, metric, and use-wear analyses, the bifaces were likely produced locally, used during important hunting or warfare activities, and then ritually deposited in the Terminal Classic. These bifaces were likely hafted to spearthrower darts and represented “success” at hunting or fighting. The recovery of weaponry in problematic deposits that is not the direct result of warfare is an important observation because Mayanists have generally interpreted their presence in these contexts as evidence of warfare. The fact that the points were recovered in groups of seven and nine may indicate that they had important symbolic meanings that connected them to supernatural or mythological places or entities.

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