Dibble’s Reduction Thesis: Its Implications for Lithic Analysis and Macroarchaeology

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.

Dibble demonstrated systematic effects of reduction on the size and shape of Middle Paleolithic flake tools. He identified independent (e.g., platform dimensions,) and dependent (e.g. flake mass) variables that registered the degree and pattern of reduction experienced by retouched tools. The result held implications for understanding of Middle Paleolithic assemblage variation that even now are incompletely assimilated. But Dibble’s influence extended beyond the European Paleolithic. Others identified complementary reduction methods and measures (e.g., retouch and geometric indices), defined curation as a function of reduction, and developed methods to analyze reduction distributions. Today a set of methods permits comprehensive reduction analysis of archaeological assemblages and their comparison in the abstract despite the great diversity of time-space contexts. Dibble argued that many assemblages are time-averaged accumulations. In cases from New Zealand to North America, methods developed following his approach reveal the complex processes by which behavior, tool use, curation, and time interacted to yield those accumulations. We are coming to understand that the record is no mere collection of ethnographic vignettes, instead a body of data that requires macroarchaeological perspectives (sensu Perreault 2019). Archaeology’s coming conceptual revolution in part is a legacy of Dibble’s thought.

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): 37161.0