The EAST Typology: A Remedy for Eastern Africa’s "Lithics Systematics Anarchy"

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances and Debates in the Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Eastern Africa boasts the world’s longest archaeological record, more than 3,4 million years so far. And yet, that record defies easy synthesis due to "lithics systematic anarchy." Archaeologists working in Eastern Africa describe and measure stone tools in so many different ways, that detailed comparisons within major age-stage are difficult and long-term comparisons across major time periods nearly impossible. This paper introduces the Eastern African Stone Tool (EAST) Typology, a hierarchical framework for describing stone tool variation specifically designed to establish concordances among different typologies and to facilitate long-term comparisons across the full sweep of Eastern African prehistory.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Recent Advances and Debates in the Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23872