Measuring Intensity: Harold Dibble’s Contributions to Paleoanthropology and Specifically to the Measure of Site Occupational Intensity

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’s contributions to Paleolithic archaeology are numerous. Of the two contributions that I feel had the largest impact, the first is the intensity of energy Dibble brought to every endeavor, particularly to broadening the application of rigorous empiricism to the archaeological record. He did this by example, challenging many of our cherished assumptions about human behavioral evolution through the demand for empirical evidence (i.e., Neanderthal burial, the desired end-product fallacy, etc.). His efforts at spreading a more scientific approach to the Paleolithic did not stop at creating more “mini-me’s” as he would say—i.e., the training of his own graduate students—but also included devoting considerable energy to the training of other young scholars along the way, including myself. The second contribution for which Dibble’s career will be remembered is his research on measuring site occupational intensity. Whether through the Middle Paleolithic scraper reduction model as applied across Bordian facies and paleoenvironmental contexts or the dynamic modeling of the directional changes in core reduction as blank length decreases, Dibble laid the groundwork for many of the modern quantitative methods of measuring occupational duration, raw material exhaustion of tools and cores, and operational sequence fragmentation.

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): 36011.0