Fracture Mechanics, Virtual Knapper, and Controlled Experiments: Toward a Better Model of Flake Formation

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Insights into flake formation have come from fracture mechanics, controlled experiments, replication studies, and attribute analysis of lithic assemblages. Fracture mechanics would seem to offer great potential for offering insights into how the variables that knappers manipulate actually change flaking outcomes, and its strength is that it is based on physical principles. However, for various reasons, fracture mechanics has had very little impact on lithic studies. Rather, most insights come from replication studies where variables that knappers think influence outcomes are tested and combined with attribute analysis. Even the controlled experiments of Dibble's group tested variables that prehistorians focused on rather than looking to fracture mechanics for models of flake formation. As a result, as Speth noted half a century ago, how or even whether the attributes we typical measure on stone tools are meaningful for explaining flake variation is typically not justified a priori by theoretical models of flake formation. A new effort to bring fracture mechanics into studies of flake formation is coming from an effort to build a virtual knapper. This program requires a generalized model of flake formation and has resulted in a new series of controlled experiments grounded more closely in fracture mechanics.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Inference in Paleoarchaeology

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33440