Contributions of Experimental Archaeology and Use-Wear Analysis to the Study of Limpets (Patella Sp.)

Summary

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

Shells have great potentials to inform about the past both from cultural and environmental perspectives. However, despite their importance for ancient people and vast occurrence in prehistoric archaeological sites, Pleistocene shells have gotten less attention. Limpets (Patella sp.) rarely occur in Mediterranean Pleistocene and Holocene assemblages, leaving us with unanswered questions about their exploitation by humans for different purposes, such as diet, tool and ornament production, and symbolic meaning. Limpets are typical marine mollusks present in intertidal environments. Based on archaeological data from shell midden sites in Europe, Africa, and the New World, and though ethnohistory and ethnography, it is well known that limpets have been widely used for dietary purposes since prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies until today in coastal areas. However, we still do not know why limpets were harvested and brought to sites where they appear more rarely, such as the Mediterranean Paleolithic, Epipaleolithic, and Mesolithic sites in Italy and Turkey. We aim to present some new results from a joint analysis based on experimental and survey research on limpets from Turkish and Italian Mediterranean coasts. Use-wear analysis and ethnographic accounts are also utilized in order to contribute a better understanding and interpretation of limpets in archaeological contexts.

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): 37696.0