Reuse and Assemblage Composition, from Tools to Flakes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 1984, Harold Dibble published his iconic scraper reduction paper. This publication, and the many that followed, played a significant role in realigning the discipline from one that retained a focus on artifact typology as the foundation for both culture historical and functional interpretations of the Paleolithic. Harold showed that what were assumed to be discrete tool types instead related to a process or tool resharpening, meaning that differences in tool type proportions might signify neither distinct culture groups nor functional artifact sets. Scraper reduction modeled changes in the morphology of retouched tools but also related these changes to artifact assemblage composition as a function of tool reuse. In Australia, Harold’s work inspired a new generation of studies, both on retouched tools and ironically on unretouched flakes. While some studies investigated the equivalent of Paleolithic scraper reduction, another set of studies investigated artifact reuse through flake removal. Using geometric measures to evidence flake transport, these later studies as reviewed in this presentation, provided a new understanding of assemblage composition, one related to the long-term history of artifact movement across landscapes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part I   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35754.0