Deciphering Bone Tool Production and Use: A Comparative Assessment of Quantitative Approaches to Microwear Analysis

Summary

Recent research in the pre-Columbian Pueblo Southwest has demonstrated the importance of understanding trends in bone industries that closely track other, related economic sectors such as perishable craft production. A vital next step in this line of inquiry is the identification the specific types of production activities in which bone tools are employed and variation across time and space. As illustrated by the results of this pilot study, texture analysis methods, developed within the mechanical engineering discipline, show great promise for advancing the study of bone tool manufacture and use. This paper attempts to locate the most promising locations on the tool for measurement and analysis of use wear, while exploring the differences between traditional roughness measures, and multi-scale geometric analysis using area-scale fractal techniques for characterizing and discriminating microtopographic differences as a function of tool use. The scales of the use-wear and the tool Multi-scale analyses provide characterizations with greater potential for useful and confident discrimination than the traditional methods.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Exploring the Microscale: Advances and Novel Applications of Microscopy for Archaeological Materials

Keywords

Spatial Coverage