Investigating Stone Tool Recycling Behaviors in Surface Deposits in the Semizbugu Mountains, Kazakhstan

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in Central Asian Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The surface site complex of Semizbugu is a well-known Paleolithic site in Pribalkhash, Kazakhstan. Tens of thousands of artifacts from all Paleolithic periods have been collected from 11 different locations across this landscape between 1961 and 2013. During our 2022 field season, we conducted a new study at Semizbugu. We examined the distributions of recycled artifacts in these deposits to determine what conditions encourage recycling behaviors. We employed a new data collection methodology to document the spatial location of individual artifacts in multiple deposits. We analyzed over 3,000 artifacts from five different locations in the Semizbugu mountains. Each of the study areas contained recycled implements. Further analyses demonstrate spatially distinct associations between recycling signatures and other artifact characteristics among and within the study areas. The patterns of recycling at Semizbugu, therefore, indicate the presence of local-scale factors that cause areas of the landscape to be used differently in a recycling regime. This study proves that considering surface deposits is essential to further our understanding of recycling behaviors. This project represents an important first step to explore the range of conditions that promote recycling in order to build complete models for how this behavior functioned in the past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Advances and New Perspectives in Central Asian Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35589.0