Introduction to Session with a Discussion of Measuring Stone Tool Diversity

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

It has been thirty years since the publication of Quantifying Diversity in Archaeology and this edited volume has proven to be an important benchmark in archaeological diversity studies. We review the impact this volume has had on quantitative archaeological research across a number of subfields. We then provide three examples of our work in the subfield of stone tool studies that have used diversity measures to investigate Paleoindian stone toolkits. First, we describe our study of Paleoindian end scrapers from sites in the Great Lakes region in which we used diversity measures to infer mobility strategies. Second, we discuss our efforts to reassess the hypothesis that the southeastern United States possesses greater Paleoindian point diversity than other regions. Our research supported this hypothesis and suggested that finer regional distinctions in point diversity could be made. Third, we summarize our study that compared the diversity of early Paleoindian point classes between the western and eastern halves of North America. Our findings suggest that Paleoindians in the East used a more diverse set of points than in the West and we posit that environmental heterogeneity in the East promoted increased experimentation with point designs.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25247