Use-wear analysis of the stone tools at the Wansan site, a Neolithic site in Taiwan

Summary

This is a multi-stage project intending to extrapolate the possible usages of various stone tools excavated from the Neolithic Wansan site in Northern Taiwan. In this poster, I want to demonstrate the preliminary results of the first stage that tries to identify possible patterns of tool use-wear. There are abundant finely ground lithic tools uncovered from the Wansan site. Previous research categorized these tools based on their morphology, and classified these tools as projectile points, adzes, axes, hoes, knives, etc. The terminology implies the functions of these tools based on ethnological analogy. However, no systematic analysis of the use-wear or residue has been conducted on this collection yet. I thus propose to employ both high and low power method to observe the use-wear of these tools in the first stage in order to examine possible patterns among different types of tools. Based on the results, I can further plan next stage of research to conduct experimental archaeology and residue analysis on these tools.

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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