Justin Pargeter

The effects of Class I and II sized bovids on macrofracture formation and tool displacement: Results of a trampling experiment in a southern African Stone Age context

Abstract In this paper we follow from previous experiments that assessed the formation of macrofractures on hunting weapons and trampled tools, and present the results of a new trampling experiment. This new experiment examined the relationship between small bovid trampling and the formation of macrofracture types on replicated stone and bone tools. We also recorded the resulting displacement of the tools in order to assess the relationship between tool morphology and displacement. Three tool types with dimensions similar to southern African archaeological tools were used. The results suggest that small frequencies of certain impact macrofractures occur on tools subject to trampling forces. These frequencies are, however, lower than those generally recorded during hunting experiments. Tool morphologies and fracture combinations are also shown to be important variables in macrofracture analyses. These results contribute to a growing body of experimental data dealing with the relationship between postdepositional processes and macrofracture formation on artifacts.

Test, Model, and Method Validation: The Role of Experimental Stone Artifact Replication in Hypothesis-driven Archaeology

For many years, intuition and common sense often guided the transference of patterning ostensibly evident in experimental flintknapping results to interpretations of the archaeological record, with little emphasis placed on hypothesis testing, experimental variables, experimental design, or statistical analysis of data. Today, archaeologists routinely take steps to address these issues. We build on these modern efforts by reviewing several important uses of replication experiments: (1) as a means of testing a question, hypothesis, or assumption about certain parameters of stone-tool technology; (2) as a model, in which information from empirically documented situations is used to generate predictions; and (3) as a means of validating analytical methods. This review highlights the important strategic role that stone artifact replication experiments must continue to play in further developing a scientific approach to archaeology.

Primordialism and the ‘Pleistocene San’ of southern Africa

Abstract Analogies are an important tool of archaeological reasoning. The Kalahari San are frequently depicted in introductory texts as archetypal, mobile hunter-gatherers, and they have influenced approaches to archaeological, genetic and linguistic research. But is this analogy fundamentally flawed? Recent arguments have linked the San populations of southern Africa with the late Pleistocene Later Stone Age (c. 44 kya) at Border Cave, South Africa. The authors argue that these and other claims for the Pleistocene antiquity of modern-day cultures arise from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of cultural and archaeological taxonomies, and that they are a misuse of analogical reasoning.

WEAVING SIMPLE SOLUTIONS TO COMPLEX PROBLEMS: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF SKILL IN BIPOLAR COBBLE-SPLITTING

Bipolar technology has a complicated history in lithics research. Ethnography shows that this method comprises many different techniques, is multi-purpose and skill dependent. However, archaeological interpretations oscillate between bipolar technology being simple, inefficient, and independent of skill to it being a purposeful strategy deployed by experienced knappers. Here we test the role of skill in quartz cobble collection and bipolar cobble-splitting by experienced and inexperienced knappers. Our results demonstrate that cobble collection and splitting are skill dependent, requiring abstract knowledge for collection and physical skill for splitting. Experts selected significantly different cobbles than novices, and split them more reliably and efficiently. Overlap between some experts and novices suggested these participants possessed innate cobble-splitting skills. These results challenge the idea that simple technologies require little skill, and suggest that skill may influence the formation of platform and bulb attributes commonly used to identify bipolar reduction in archaeological assemblages.

Quantifying and Comparing Bipolar Versus Freehand Flake Morphologies, Production Currencies, and Reduction Energetics During Lithic Miniaturization

ABSTRACT Recognized by archaeologists for over a century, and practiced by hominins in nearly every archaeological context in which flaked stone is used, bipolar technology involves the coordination of at least three components (hammer, anvil, and core). Archaeologists are increasingly aware of the variability within bipolar reduction, such that it can hardly be considered a single unified reduction strategy. Our experiments investigate the role of axial bipolar reduction versus freehand reduction as strategies for lithic miniaturization on flint. The results provide clear, probabilistic, and quantifiable methods for identifying bipolar reduction in archaeological assemblages. They also show the time and energetic benefits of bipolar reduction over freehand reduction in contexts involving small, elongated flake production. Our results have wide applicability for interpreting archaeological assemblages across Africa, Europe, North America, and Australia.

Milky Quartz Bipolar Reduction and Lithic Miniaturization: Experimental Results and Archaeological Implications

ABSTRACT We present experimental data examining the energetics and identification of axial bipolar reduction in contexts of lithic miniaturization on milky quartz. These experiments answer two specific questions. First, does bipolar reduction provide any benefits over freehand reduction? Second, can axial bipolar reduction be distinguished from freehand reduction? Our data show that bipolar reduction requires significantly less time to reduce a percentage unit of core mass and to produce a millimeter of cutting edge on milky quartz than freehand reduction. Milky quartz bipolar reduction surpasses even the cutting edge production efficiency of obsidian pressure blades. We outline a series of quantitative criteria for identifying bipolar cores and flakes. Our results show that bipolar cores and flakes can be distinguished from those produced using freehand reduction by quantifying platform crushing, distal flake rebound scars, bulb shearing, as well as axial, bipolar, and splintered flake terminations. Our results challenge the widely held perceptions about the wastefulness of bipolar reduction and provide clear guidelines for identifying this reduction strategy in archaeological milky quartz assemblages.

Lithic Technological Approaches to the African Late Pleistocene Later Stone Age.

I n 1929, South African archeologists J. Goodwin and C. van Riet Lowe established the Later Stone Age (LSA) to differentiate southern African Holocene “cultures” such as “Wilton” from those of the late Pleistocene Middle Stone Age (MSA). The material culture of the LSA was then, and to some extent still is characterized by ground and flaked stone “microlithic” tools and other artifacts synonymous with the ethnographically documented Bushmen. In the following decades, archeologists subsumed other subSaharan African industries, such as “Somaliland Wilton,” within the LSA, even though those industries had little if anything to do with the Bushmen and were not necessarily of Holocene age. By the 1970s, radiocarbon dating demonstrated that some LSA sites were late Pleistocene in age. To some archeologists, this suggested that the seemingly rapid technological changes between the MSA and the late Pleistocene LSA (LP LSA) could be equated with the evolution of Homo sapiens and the appearance of modern human behavior. However, sub-Saharan African archeological research in the 1980s and 1990s showed that the MSALSA “transition” was much more complicated and asynchronous, as well as untethered to hominin turnover. African late Pleistocene research in the twenty-first century has further narrowed the temporal, technological, and definitional gaps between the MSA and LP LSA. This research has also shown greater lithic technological variability within these major divisions. Consequently, archeologists have questioned what the LSA actually represents and what its distinguishing behavioral characteristics are. WORKSHOP OVERVIEW

EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVES ON BIPOLAR TECHNOLOGY

Our introduction to this special edition of Lithic Technology Exploring Variability in Bipolar Technology does not attempt to summarize the papers found in the volume. This is done succinctly and accurately by Tostevin and Shott in this volume’s concluding section (Tostevin & Shott ). Here we briefly discuss a theme recurring in most of the volume’s papers, the importance of simple technologies for exploring the evolution of human behavioral variability (Shea ). Bipolar technology is important for studying the evolution of human behavioral variability because of its ubiquity in the archaeological record. Over and again, humans and their ancestors chose to deploy bipolar techniques in varying social and ecological settings. From the earliest flake production and block modification using hammers and anvils (e.g. Mora and de la Torre ) to late Pleistocene bipolar bladelet production (e.g. Brantingham et al. ), bipolar technology was useful for many different purposes. Bipolar reduction can therefore be considered an example of an exapted technology (sensu Gould and Vrba ), that is, technologies re-introduced for purposes other than those associated with their origins. The ubiquity of bipolar technology in the Stone Age gives it less utility as an “Age” or “Industry” marker (e.g. de la Pena and Wadley ). Its importance lies rather in what it can tell us about the evolution of human behavioral variability and its responsiveness to ecological and social changes. Archaeologists have made considerable strides towards accurately identifying and quantifying traces of bipolar technology on a wide variety of rock types (e.g. de la Pena ; Diez-Martin et al. ; Kuijt et al. ; Leaf ; Verges and Olle ). This has made bipolar technology more visible and thereby more accessible for comparative studies examining the role of simple technologies across the entire archaeological record. Bipolar technology remains unique in this regard. The papers in this volume define, identify, and explain strategic variation in bipolar technology, as they examine the social (e.g. skill [Duke and Pargeter ]), situational (e.g. raw material availability [Gurtov and Eren ] and functional variability [Jeske and Sterner-Miller ]), and structural (e.g. core size [Hiscock ]) variables that place selective pressures on these simple technologies. Together, they join a growing movement in lithic studies away from purely descriptive studies of lithic patterning, towards understanding the behavioral processes that underpin these patterns (e.g. Eren et al. ; Kuhn :; Lewis et al. ; Tostevin ). Human mobility patterns, settlement dynamics and the cultural transmission of technological knowledge are other examples of behavioral and organizational questions that can be suitably investigated using context-specific studies of bipolar technology. Similar questions about human strategic behavioral variability have led to an increased incorporation of evolutionary methods and theory into lithic studies (e.g. Lycett and von CramonTaubadel ; Mackay et al. ). These studies show that “evolution” in archaeology describes more than developmental sequences, straight lines, or ladders (see Langbroek ). These traditional, linear perspectives more accurately referred to as cultural evolutionism (see Dunnell ), underplay the importance of simple technologies in human behavioral evolution. Evolutionary perspectives, on the other hand, aim to understand strategic variation in human behavior and its material manifestations with accommodations for the co-occurrence and reoccurrence of simple and complex technologies (see Prentiss et al. ).

New ages from Boomplaas Cave, South Africa, provide increased resolution on late/terminal Pleistocene human behavioural variability

ABSTRACT Boomplaas Cave, South Africa, contains a rich archaeological record, with evidence of human occupation from >66,000 years ago until the protohistoric period. Notwithstanding a long history of research at the site, its existing chronology can benefit from revision. Many of the site’s members are currently delimited by only a single conventional radiocarbon date and some of the existing dates were measured on materials now known to be unsuitable for radiocarbon dating. Here we present the results of an ongoing effort to redate key late/terminal Pleistocene sequences in southern Africa. This paper presents a Bayesian-modelled radiocarbon chronology for the late/terminal Pleistocene horizons at Boomplaas. Our model incorporates previously published radiocarbon dates as well as new accelerator mass spectrometry ages. We also present archaeological evidence to examine in greater detail than was previously possible the nature of occupation patterning across the late/terminal Pleistocene and to assess technological change across two of the site’s Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) members. The new dates and archaeological data confirm that the site was occupied in a series of low intensity events in the early LGM and immediately thereafter. The site was occupied intensively in the terminal Pleistocene in line with major changes in palaeoenvironments and sea-level fluctuations. The lithic data show the use of variable technological strategies in contexts of shifting mobility and site occupation patterns. Our discussion informs upon hunter-gatherer behavioural variability that did not, and should not be expected to, reflect the strategies adopted and adapted by a handful of well-known arid-zone hunter-gatherers in the twentieth-century Kalahari.

Assessing raw material's role in bipolar and freehand miniaturized flake shape, technological structure, and fragmentation rates

This paper concludes a long-term experimental study to examine the role of bipolar and freehand reduction as strategies for lithic miniaturization on milky quartz and flint. The experiments provide clear quantifiable guidelines for identifying bipolar reduction in archeological assemblages. They suggest that with bipolar reduction—a straightforward and time-efficient strategy to learn—toolmakers could easily surpass the cutting edge/mass efficiency levels of more derived lithic reduction strategies such as pressure blade production. Here we compared the efficiency and technological attributes on the experiment’s milky quartz and flint flakes. The results show few practically significant differences between the two flake samples. The strongest differences are in the flakes’ ventral surface and platform features. Otherwise, we concur with previous experimental studies that show certain types of milky quartz behave in essentially the same way as other brittle materials such as flint. Our results aid the identification of bipolar reduction with a focus on cores and flakes. They contribute to a growing body of literature showing the importance of simple, but not simplistic, technological strategies in prehistoric human decision-making.