Stone Tools from the Buen Suceso Site, Santa Elena, Ecuador

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the summer of 2018, the lithic artifacts of two units of the Late Valdivia (2100 BC - 1800 BC) occupation of the Buen Suceso site were analyzed as an undergraduate research project. The Valdivia people were a settled agricultural society based on the utilization of marine, forest, and riverine resources. The people of Buen Suceso lived on the edge of the cloud forest in western Ecuador, on the banks of the Culebra-Colin River not far inland from the Pacific Coast. Their ancestors were one of the first people to develop ceramic technology in South America, and yet they utilized a simple flake based lithic technology that was little changed from their hunting and gathering predecessors. In this poster, we examine the physical characteristics of some of these lithic artifacts and present some preliminary suggestions about their manufacture. Patterns of material selection and flake sizes are investigated, and changes in flake size and distribution are analyzed. While most of the artifacts examined were amorphous flakes, some may have been designed specifically to be comfortable to hold in the hand.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24856