Rethinking the cultural taxonomy of the Euro Palaeolithic through 2D elliptic Fourier analysis
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 05/10/2020

A  fundamental  precondition  to  understanding  the  nature  of  population  and  social  learning  structures throughout the Palaeolithic is the unambiguous definition of comparative analytical units.  However,  in  the  creation  of  such  taxa  for  the  European  Final  Palaeolithic  there  is  sig-nificant ambiguity in the appropriateness of current units for a number of research-historicaleasons. Furthermore, rigorous high-resolution frameworks which test the robustness of groups and artefact types for this period are lacking. Here we use elliptic Fourier analysis (EFA) on a large sample (n = 2200) of Final Palaeolithic formal projectile point types (backed points and tanged points), in order to assess whether perceived ‘ethnogeographic’ variability can be cap-tured quantitatively and across regions and research traditions. We then present agglomerative hierarchical clustering (using the principal component scores) of these point types to discuss the appropriateness and robustness of current analytical units.


Christian Steven Hoggard, Felix Riede