Profiling the Past: About the Importance of Excavating Side View and Sieving with a Small Mesh for Retrieving Blade/Bladelet Production in Middle Paleolithic and Early Upper Paleolithic Contexts

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Developing Paleolithic Excavation Methods for the Twenty-First Century" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Excavation involves working both in side-view (i.e., with profiles), to recognize the stratigraphy, and in plan-view to excavate features and layers. Here we want to elaborate on the advantages of working mainly in side-view at Paleolithic sites with long, complex stratigraphies with high find densities. Sieving is known to be crucial for the recovery of smaller finds, including micro-blades, micro-points, and bladelets. However, among European Middle Paleolithic excavations, sieving with a mesh smaller than 5 mm is not always done. Recent analysis of micro-lithics recovered from the 1, 2, and 4 mm sieve mesh in European Middle Paleolithic context show the importance of small mesh sieving to better document and reconstruct micro-debitage production and use in the deep past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Developing Paleolithic Excavation Methods for the Twenty-First Century   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37176.0