An Assemblage-Level Comparison of Silcrete Flake Attributes across Three Methods of Heat Treatment: Preliminary Results from Actualistic Experiments

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Lithic heat treatment technology was utilized as early as ~162,000 years ago at Pinnacle Point in South Africa to improve the quality of silcrete raw material for flaking. Despite its antiquity, we have little understanding of how these early Middle Stone Age humans heat-treated silcrete and why. A primary reason for this is a general lack of proxies for determining the method of heat treatment in the archaeological record that have been rigorously demonstrated through large-scale, actualistic experiments. Further, there are only a handful of actualistic studies that attempt to quantify and compare the outcome of each method of heat treatment. Here, we analyze flakes knapped from 20 unheated and experimentally heat-treated nodules of silcrete across three methods of heat treatment: the direct method, the ember method, and the sand bath method. Using the E5 lithic coding system developed by Shannon McPherron, we document qualitative and quantitative flake attributes and aggregate these data by heat treatment method to determine if there are statistical differences or discernable patterns between methods of heat treatment at an assemblage scale. Our results will allow us to better understand how the method of heat treatment relates to the characteristics of silcrete flake assemblages.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36559.0