PATTERNS IN STONE: A COMPARATIVE FRAMEWORK OF INTRA-SITE SPATIAL PATTERNING
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2020-10-06

Lithic artifacts present unique opportunities for study, since they are the most ubiquitous artifact in the archaeological record, spanning from the earliest hominids to the late-Neolithic periods. Although faunal and organic remains can reveal additional dimensions of behavior, stone artifacts are found at nearly every site. Therefore, a focus on lithic tools provides the most widely applicable focus for comparative studies. Of course, stone tool typologies have been the predominant focus of comparative frameworks, particularly for the most ancient assemblages. Since the development of lithic typologies, many alternate and complimentary methods of studying stone tools have been proposed and adopted. Here, a new method for analyzing the spatial patterning of lithic artifacts is presented. This method builds on French and American traditions of stone tool analysis, uniting lithic refitting with quantitativemethods. This method was designed to be utilized in a comparative framework, so that the spatial patterning of lithic artifacts at many different sites can be directly compared. Therefore, the analysis does not incorporate the existence of fire features or other structures that are traditionally utilized in intra-site spatial analyses. Instead, it relies on lithic refitting and the spatial clustering of lithic artifacts. The results of this analysis both rely on and contribute to theoretical approaches that explain how lithics are knapped, selected, moved, and utilized within archaeological sites.

Author(s): Clark, Amy (The University of Oklahoma)