Bifaces to Go (Again): Building on Huckell’s Experimental Archaeology Legacy

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Celebration of Bruce B. Huckell, Part 2" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Bruce Huckell was a pioneer of experimental archaeology. His early work “Of Chipped Stone Tools, Elephants, and the Clovis Hunters” and “The Denver Elephant Project” demonstrated how actualistic experiments offer archaeologists powerful interpretative data for understanding Paleoindian technology and subsistence. This paper builds on a more recent experiment presented by Huckell and colleagues in 2002 entitled “Bifaces to Go: An Experimental Study of the Genesis of Transport Wear.” To investigate the effects of long-distance transport on stone tool surfaces, Huckell and colleagues carried 16 experimental bifaces in packs across varied terrains for a total distance of 70 km. Here we review Huckell et al.’s original observations and present new high-power microwear results to help document the traces acquired as stone tools are carried great distances. We explore the patterns of transport wear traces and how they can be distinguished from usewear.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Papers in Celebration of Bruce B. Huckell, Part 2

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52384