Integrating Fracture Mechanics into the Design and Implementation of Controlled Lithic Experiments

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.

The underlying physics of stone tool production is an important component in the studies of lithic technology. The field of fracture mechanics offers rich literature on the basic principles of flake initiation, propagation, and termination. However, results from these fracture mechanics studies are not well applied to interpret the variation observed in the lithic record. Despite the great effort of many experimental lithic studies on the fundamental processes of flaking, there is still a general lack of connection between the basic fracture mechanics of rocks and the flake formation process. Building on the pioneering work of Harold Dibble on mechanical flaking experiments, here we present a series of controlled experiments guided by fracture mechanics to investigate various aspects of force delivery during the knapping process, including the hammer impact angle, hammer size, and hammer speed. Our results demonstrate both the importance and applicability of integrating fracture mechanics theory into hypotheses formation and experimental design of lithic studies to move beyond studying the empirical relationships between different knapping variables. We show that fracture-mechanics-governed lithic experiments provide a more robust framework to quantify knapping behaviors based on basic flaking mechanics and produce results that can be generalized to a much broader context.

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

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37150.0