Comparing Quartz Lithic Technological Organization of Early Holocene Foragers and Iron Age Farmers at Kakapel Rockshelter, Western Kenya

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Quartz is a readily available lithic raw material that formed a large portion of the stone tool economy for many ancient societies globally. Considered a lower-quality material overall, physical properties of crystalline vein quartz constrain reduction strategies, often resulting in a narrow range of tool and debitage morphologies. This leaves open questions of how variable strategies of quartz reduction can possibly be and whether assemblages produced through different behavioral patterns can be quantitatively differentiated. This paper addresses these questions through quantitative comparisons of large quartz assemblages from Early Holocene (9000-5000 BP) forager and Iron Age agropastoralist (1500-900 BP) occupations at Kakapel Rockshelter, southwestern Kenya. Given similar ecological conditions, resource availability, and raw material access, analyses tested whether major differences in subsistence economy and settlement pattern produced detectable variation in vein quartz lithic industries at Kakapel. While there no detectable differences in overall core reduction strategies between groups/periods, foragers and food-producer quartz technology differed in terms of nodule and hammerstone selection, types of tools produced, and reduction intensity. These findings indicate that despite constraints of low-quality lithic materials, meaningful variation between assemblages can exist and may reflect important dimensions of group mobility, land-use, and economic organization.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53054