The Relationship between Knapping Technology and Stone Use in the MSA Landscape of Northern Butana in Sudan

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Variability: A Reassessment of Its Meaning, Afforded Range, and the Relation to Process" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 2022 we recorded more than 40 variously dense stone artifact concentrations of the Middle Stone Age in northern Butana between the Nile Valley and the Atbara paleolake in east-central Sudan. In general, the entire region between the Upper Egypt and the Ethiopian Highlands has seen very little research of the Pleistocene records, especially to the extent sufficient to characterize the human behavior beyond mere flaking technology and artifact forms production. Here we first present the relationship between the variability in this technology and proxies of stone movement, reduction, and reuse, as sampled in these aggregates. We then examine these modeled relationships in regard to the locations of the raw material outcrops, our landscape sampling strategy, and the current visibility of this record. Our goal is two-fold: first, to use the variability of this record to infer past behavioral processes informing on the character of the landscape use (random vs. systematic), allowing us to test some of the existing landscape-use models for the broader northeastern African region, and, second, to examine the impacts of our own archaeological fieldwork practice (in this case, in landscape sampling) on archaeological knowledge generation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Variability: A Reassessment of Its Meaning, Afforded Range, and the Relation to Process   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36068.0