Macroscopic Comparative Studies of Archaeological Data: Spatiotemporal Variability in Lithic Technology of Paleolithic Asia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Comparative studies using archaeological data on a broad spatiotemporal scale can provide an overview for investigating significant questions in human history and can promote discussions among scholars from different disciplines. This talk will present the results of a quantitative analysis of lithic technologies from the PaleoAsia Database, developed as a part of the “Cultural History of PaleoAsia” project. The database comprises information about the presence or absence of 24 distinct lithic technologies across 895 lithic assemblages spanning from 130 to 20 ka, along with spatial, temporal, and other archaeological information. Our analysis identified and visualized spatiotemporal variations in lithic technologies, potentially linked to the dispersal of modern humans. For instance, the frequencies of blade/bladelet production and microlithic tools concurrently increased primarily in the north of the Himalaya Mountains, even though the occurrence of these technologies exhibited a mosaic pattern in northern China. However, large-scale comparative studies have various limitations, including issues in developing a unified coding scheme and sampling biases. We will further present our attempts to address these issues, including geometric morphometrics and simulations using data from the Japanese archipelago.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38723.0