Stone tool cache on the landscape: a study of the Tomamu-Daichi cache in Hokkaido, Japan

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Late Pleistocene Archaeology of the Northern Pacific Rim" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

A stone-tool cache isolated on a given landscape raises the question as to why hunter-gatherers cached stone tools in a specific location on the given landscape and the extent to which they were transported between a manufactured place (e.g., lithic raw material outcrop) and a location of cache. In this paper, we will summarize recent advancement of the study of the Tomamu-Daichi (T-D) cache, accidentally found late Upper Paleolithic stone-tool cache unassociated with lithic scatters in eastern Hokkaido (Japan). Based on morphometric observations on thecached tools consisting of bifaces, bifacial projectile points and blades, we will test predictions on the relationship between utility and transportation cost of stone tools, notably bifaces. Given its comparative nature to the prominent bifacial technology and stone-tool caches in the terminal Pleistocene North American record (i.e. the Clovis complex), results of analysis on the T-D cache will give an insight into the organization of bifacial technology in relation to hunter-gatherers’ decision-makings regardingmobility and tool curation not only in the regional context,but also in the broader context of the hunter-gatherer societies along the northern Pacific.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Late Pleistocene Archaeology of the Northern Pacific Rim

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52630