Investigating the Morphological Variation of Endthinning Scars on Paleoindian Bifacial Projectile Point Morphologies Using Geometric Morphometrics

Summary

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

Endthinning, the removal of longitudinal flakes from the base of a biface, is a key diagnostic flaking characteristic of Clovis, Gainey, Folsom, Cumberland, and other Early and Middle Paleoindian biface and projectile point technologies. In the Late Paleoindian Dalton tradition in the eastern United States, endthinning occurs less consistently on points and is less frequently used by researchers as a core diagnostic characteristic of Dalton bifacial technology. Recent advancements in geometric morphometric analyses offer new methods to help understand the functional implications of endthinning and its impact on point morphology. In this paper, we briefly review approaches to studying variation in endthinning. We then apply geometric morphometrics to a sample of points from the Dalton Heartland to characterize aspects of Dalton point technology and morphology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Geometric Morphometrics in Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33616