Good Things Come in Small Packages: Acheulian Small Tool Assemblages from the Shishan Marsh site (Jordan).

Summary

Over the past century, prehistorians studying Acheulian assemblages have focused their energies largely on the handaxe arguing that its iconic symmetrical, tear drop shape can be a window onto the origins and evolution of modern cognition, sociality, language, teaching, skill acquisition, and even symbolic behavior. This focus on the handaxe, and by extension big game hunting, has largely been at the expense of Acheulian small tool and microlithic assemblages and their associated tasks. These assemblages, comprised of small cores and utilized flakes and tools of less than 5 cm in length, are known from sites in Europe, the Levant, Africa and Asia. A comprehensive study of these assemblages may challenge our definitions of what constitutes the "Acheulian" and alter our understanding of Lower Paleolithic subsistence practices, craft production and technical knowledge. In this paper, we present a detailed study of the small tool assemblages from the Shishan Marsh site, a newly excavated Acheulian paleomarsh site in Azraq, northeast Jordan and explore the role these assemblages played in hominin survival in a shifting paleodesert environment.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage