Core Variability in the Middle Stone Age of East Africa

Summary

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

Harold Dibble made major contributions to the study of cores and their relation to flake morphology. Other experimental studies have shown that repeated core morphologies may be the result of a complex series of learned steps, which are culturally transmitted (e.g., K. L. Ranhorn, PhD dissertation, George Washington University, 2017; Ranhorn et al., Evol. Anthro. 29:53–55; Stout et al., Curr. Anthro. 60:305–340, 2019), although other factors such as raw material form or qualities are also important (e.g., Tryon and Ranhorn, in H. Groucutt, ed., Culture History and Convergent Evolution, pp. 305–340, Springer, 2020). Here we present a comparative study of core variation in the Middle Stone Age of East Africa, between >320ka and <105ka in multiple raw materials. We focus especially on cores from the early MSA at Olorgesailie (Southern Kenya Rift) and cores from the later MSA at Aduma, (Middle Awash Valley, Ethiopia). We also discuss approaches to characterizing core variation including attributes introduced by Dibble.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37730.0