You’ve Got Tools: Evaluating Comparability Among 3D Lithic Angle Measurement Tools

Summary

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

It is widely accepted that angle measurements taken on lithic artifacts form a crucial part of lithic analysis. Thanks to advances in 3D-scanning technology, researchers now have virtual angle-measuring options. However, since these new virtual tools were created independently and thus are utilizing their own “suite” of algorithms dependent on the creators’ professional opinions, goals, and expectations, it was still uncertain whether the variation between these algorithms is substantial enough to affect comparability. This poster reports the results from evaluating the comparability of the three most common virtual angle measurement tools used presently in lithic analyses: the Virtual Goniometer (Yezzi-Woodley et al. 2021), Lithics3D (Pop 2019), and Artifact3-D (Valletta et al. 2020; Grosman et al. 2022). After replicating angle measurements (edge angles and exterior platform angles) on a sample of 150 lithic objects using the three virtual tools and the manual goniometer, analyses were conducted to understand the degree of variability present among measurements as byproducts of the tools themselves. The goal of these comparisons is not to determine whether one virtual tool is more accurate than another, but rather to understand the inherent tool variability, which may inadvertently be interpreted as being behaviorally relevant.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37515.0