Scales of Analysis, Scales of Interpretation: Interpretive Scope and Analytical Precision in Lithic Use-wear Research or ‘Trees are great but don’t forget about the forest!’

Summary

Ever since the inception of the New Archaeology back in the 1960s there has been an emphasis within the discipline on increasing analytical rigor through ever-more precise quantification of material culture variability. While striving to improve and expand our analytical arsenal is always a worthy pursuit, these efforts must be accompanied by critical reflection on how and why we use our increasingly refined analytical techniques to address larger behavioral and cultural questions. Precise and accurate measurement of physical artifact attributes is, of course, an essential component of any program of research, but an appropriate contextual rationale for the recording and evaluation of such data is equally fundamental. The proposed presentation will examine the use of GIS in characterizing changes in stone tool surface microtopography documented using both incident light and scanning electron microscopy and how the resulting specific quantitative data can be used to not only characterize the individual tool surfaces but also to explore broader patterns of tool using behavior and their possible cultural underpinnings.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Innovative Interpretive Approaches in Microwear and Residue Analyses

Keywords

Spatial Coverage