• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage

The Middle Pleistocene sile of El Sartalejo is localed in the Alagon valley of the western Southern Meseta of central Spain close to the. confluence of the Alagon and Jerte rivers. Lower Palaeolithic artefacts have been reported in this area between the Alagon and Jerte valleys for some time. Most of the sites are located in the middle terraces of the Alagon and Jerte rivers, in the widest areas of the Valleys. Indeed the Alagon valley provides a natural path through this area of the Central Cordillera between the region of Extremadura to the east and the northern Meseta.

This paper presents lithic technology studies on the Middle and Late period of the Upper Palaeolithic in Hungary between 26 and 13 ka BP. The studies aimed at describing and then comparing the technological processes from lithic raw material procurement to the formal tool making. An attempt was made to find correlations between technological features and chronological positions of the assemblages to see if lithic technology operated traditionally or opportunistically. The study found that technology was rather shaped toward efficiency with adaptive behavior. Therefore, in most cases, the way how tools were made is useless to differentiate archaeological cultures, while the tools themselves, especially the armatures, can be markers of cultures as was shown earlier. This study found that the formation of the archaeological record and its variability most likely depended upon the dynamism of human ecology

(1981). A Pilot Study in Bifacial Lithic Reduction Sequences. Lithic Technology: Vol. 10, No. 2-3, pp. 34-47.

Quarries are fixed locationally, whereas most seasonally abundant food resources in northern latitudes are not. Toolstone procurement must therefore be ‘factored in’ to other resource procurement strategies. As sources of useable toolstone, quarries are the logical starting point for the study of how stone tool-using societies organized their technologies in accordance with their subsistence and social needs. Yet they have often been ignored by archaeologists because of the logistical problems presented by their typically enormous and variable assemblages. Quartz differs from more common, crypto-crystalline raw materials such as chert, flint or chalcedony. It is harder, more brittle, and has different fracture properties. It is less common archaeologically than crypto-crystalline toolstone, and archaeologists tend to either avoid quartz assemblages altogether, or to automatically and uncritically analyze them in the same manner as crypto-crystalline toolstones without considering their different properties. The Grandfather Quarry (HbMd-4) offers an opportunity to address these problems at once. Using Lithic Technological Organization theory, a mass analysis (after Ahler 1989), modified and combined with an attribute analysis, demonstrates that this method is a useful tool for examining large, complex assemblages such as those found in quarry sites. While more time-consuming and labour-intensive than a standard mass analysis, the modified version allows for the collection of a large number of attribute data that lend robusticity to the results and provide academic rigour. This research also demonstrates that quartz assemblages can indeed be examined using the same methods as for other raw materials, provided the unique properties of quartz as a toolstone are considered. It is shown that although the overall quality of toolstone from this source is quite poor, the Grandfather Quarry was likely the only reliable source, or at least one of a very few reliable sources, of quartz toolstone in the Churchill River Basin. All useable toolstone was intensively exploited, but rare nodules of higher quality quartz were set aside for in situ reduction into cores, tools and bifaces. Lastly, the unexpected discovery of microblade technology at the quarry opens new avenues for future research in the northern Manitoba Boreal Forest.

Data for attribute analysis conducted for MPhil dissertation. Xuan Truong Enterprise

Excavations at site 40HO13 in Houston County, Tennessee, documented three prehistoric lithic reduction areas associated with a Benton Phase occupation. The site was located in an area of abundant c...

A review of recent research on lithic technology and functional analysis is presented. Our perception of the state of the art is based on a review of the literature published during the past three years and on the topics that were covered at conferences and workshops on lithic analysis. While the goals have essentially remained the same since the turn of the century, concerns with chronology and the classification of lithic artifacts have given way to studies that treat stone implements as products of a dynamic system of human behavior. In order to understand stone artifacts and the people that made and used them, archaeologists must understand theprocesses involved in the acquisition, production, exchange, and consumption of lithic artifacts. In the past ten years, experimental studies involving the manufacturing and use of stone tools have been integrated with studies of refitted or conjoined lithic artifacts and microwear analysis. The result is a much more dynamic view of the variability in assemblages of lithic artifacts. In this review, we focus on replication and technological analysis of chipped stone artifacts and microwear analysis, and consider the implications of this research.