Lithics, Landscapes & la Longue-Durée – Curation as an Expression of Forager Mobility

Summary

With the recognition that practically all archaeological sites are depositional composites unrelated to the activities of any contemporary group of individuals (i.e., palimpsests) and that forager adaptations are not ‘site-specific’ but rather landscape-scaled phenomena, statistical approaches designed to take these predicates into account have been developed over the past decade that depart from the traditional techno-typological systematics used for decades in much of Europe and the Levant. Based on artifact density and the frequency of retouched pieces scaled to the volume of sediment excavated in cave and rockshelter sites (Riel-Salvatore & Barton 2004), and the ratio of retouched artifacts to artifact totals scaled to unit area in surface sites (Miller & Barton 2008), they can potentially determine whether or not changes in mobility and land-use often assumed to have coincided with major evolutionary events (e.g., the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition) actually occurred. Lithic artifact counts and densities from excavated cave and rockshelter sites and surface surveys in Spain and Jordan are used to illustrate the potential of the approach.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Papers in Honor of Lawrence Guy Straus

Keywords

Spatial Coverage