Challenging Current Perspectives on Late Pleistocene Stone Toolkits across Beringia through Use-Wear Analysis

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Current Research and Challenges in Arctic and Subarctic Cultural Heritage Studies" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Microblade technologies are a structuring component of the Late Pleistocene archaeology across the Bering Strait because of their wide chronological and geographical extension. To fully understand the technoeconomical strategies underlying the success of this innovative toolkit in periglacial environments, we propose a macroregional technofunctional comparison of contexts yielding early microblade components on Hokkaïdo (Pirika), in Eastern Siberia (Kovrizhka IV) and in Interior Alaska (Swan Point). Use-wear data allow defining how tools were implemented (gesture, worked materials, hafting) and managed (sharpening, reuse, multiple uses, recycling, transport). Specific tool categories such as endscrapers were specialized in a task and had long biographies, while microblades were multipurpose tools with short lifetimes. Their high standardization and overproduction may have aimed at a fast and easy maintenance of composite tools. Chaînes opératoires were segmented at different steps (e.g., tools production and use, hide processing), facilitating the mobility of groups. These data show that in the contexts considered, the anticipation of needs was an important feature of the life of nomadic societies of hunter-gatherers.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Current Research and Challenges in Arctic and Subarctic Cultural Heritage Studies   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38732.0