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Less than two decades ago, archaeologists considered lithic debitage, the flakes and debris left from the manufacture of stone tools, little more than uninformative waste. Since then, fieldworkers have increasingly recognized that stone flakes can provide information both singly and in aggregate.

Many methods are now available for analyzing lithic debitage, yet no single method is entirely reliable as a vehicle to meaningful interpretation of past behavior. Part of the problem lies in the disparity between tightly controlled experimental conditions and the difficulty of sorting individual sequences out of the masses of stone found in many archaeological sites. Contributors to this volume seek to identify the strengths and weaknesses in the more widespread and competing analytical forms while arguing for the use of multiple lines of evidence. As the title indicates, their primary focus is on mass analysis of aggregates rather than individual flakes. Thus several chapters also address problems of subdividing aggregates to better deal with the “mixed assemblages” generated by multiple factors over time.

Over a 40-year period, Craig Johnson collected data on chipped stone tools from nearly 200 occupations along the Missouri River in the Dakotas. This book integrates those data with central place foraging theory and exchange models to arrive at broad conclusions supporting archaeological theory. The emphasis is on the last 1,000 years, when the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara farmer-hunters dominated the area, but also looks back some 10,000 years to more nomadic peoples. The long timespan and large number of villages and campsites help define changes through time and over large distances of local and nonlocal tool stone and its manufacture into arrow points, knives, and other tools.
 
Central place foraging theory, through the field processing model, posits that the farther a source material is from the central living area, the more it will be processed before it is transported back, to avoid hauling heavy, nonusable parts on long trips. Johnson’s data support this theory and demonstrate that this model applies not only to nomadic hunter-gatherers but also to semisedentary farmer-hunters. His results also indicate that toolstone usage creates distinctive spatial patterns along the Missouri River, largely related to village distance from the sources. This is best illustrated with Knife River flint, which gradually declines in popularity downriver from its source in west-central North Dakota but increases in central South Dakota because of exchange.

Contributors
William Andrefsky Jr. / Andrew P. Bradbury / Philip J. Carr / CarolynConklin /

D. Randall Cooper / Jason L.Edmonds / Jay D. Franklin / Albert C.Goodyear III /

Joel Hardison / Lucinda M. Langston / D. Shane Miller / George H.Odell /

Charlotte D. Pevny / Tara L. Potts /Sarah E. Price / Douglas Sain / Sarah C.Sherwood /

Ashley M. Smallwood /Paul Thacker

Lithic analysis in North America traditionally has focused on bifacially retouched pieces, or bifaces. Angela Close contends that such an approach has ignored cores and debitage to the detriment of analysis.
 

At English Camp on San Juan Island, Washington, an earlier excavation (1950) kept the bifaces and discarded everything else, unstudied. Typically, the bifaces themselves have been used as type-fossils, allowing assignment of occupation to a chronological phase but serving little other purpose. North American lithic analysis has seen a move away from this approach and toward other aspects of lithic assemblages, yet the emphasis is still on the genesis of bifaces.
 

In this volume, Close uses a fine-grained study to critique American approaches to lithic analysis. Her approach is based on chaîne opératoire analysis, which applied here attempts to trace the life-histories of all artifacts in an assemblage from raw material procurement to discard and entry into the archaeological record. This approach is aimed explicitly at the people behind the artifacts.
 

Close’s final and likely controversial analysis is that women did a great deal of the tool manufacture at this particular site.

Debitage, the by-product flakes and chips from stone tool production, is the most abundant artifact type in prehistoric archaeological sites. For much of the period in which archaeology has employed scientific methodology, debitage has been discarded or ignored as debris. Now archaeologists have begun to recognize its potential to provide information about the kinds of tools produced and the characteristics of the technology being employed. Debitage can even provide clues regarding human organizational systems such as settlement mobility and site functions.

This volume brings together some of the most recent research on debitage analysis and interpretation. It presents stone tool production experiments and offers detailed archaeological investigations for interpreting variability at the individual and collective levels. Although there are a number of volumes that focus on general analysis of lithic artifacts, this is the first volume to address debitage and should be of use to a wide range of archaeological researchers.

Lithic Technologies in SedentarySocieties examines lithic technology from ancient societies in Mesoamerica, the Near East, South Asia, and North America, showcasing the important contributions in-depth lithic analysis can make to the study of sedentary societies around the world. Using cutting-edge analytical techniques these case studies address difficult anthropological questions concerning economic, social, and political issues, as well as global trends in lithic production.
 
Lithic analysis focused on sedentary societies, especially in places like Mesoamerica, has previously been neglected mostly because of the high frequency of informal tools, but such bias limits the ways in which both lithic production and economic organization are investigated. Bringing the importance of studying such technologies to the fore and emphasizing the vital anthropological questions that lithics can answer, Lithic Technologies in Sedentary Societies is a valuable resource for scholars and students of lithic technology and sedentary, complex societies.
 
 Contributors: Fumi Arakawa, Mary A. Davis, James Enloe, Dan Healan, Francesca Manclossi, Theodore Marks, Jayur Madhusudan Mehta, Jason S. R. Paling, Steve Rosen, John Whittaker
 

Although Neandertals lived in Europe and western Asia for more than 200,000 years, we know surprisingly little about them or about their everyday lives. Evidence of their behavior is largely derived from the surviving pieces of chipped stone and animal bone that resulted from their activities. One of the largest concentrations of stone and bone artifacts left by Neandertals was at the famous archaeological site of La Quina in southwestern France.

This study of the significance of changes through time revealed by an analysis of the chipped stone at La Quina reports on the excavations of the Cooperative American–French Excavation Project from 1985 to 1994. It moves beyond the largely descriptive and subjective approaches that have traditionally been applied to this kind of evidence and applies several important quantitative analytical techniques. These new approaches incorporate the history of previous excavations at the site, the results of the work of the Cooperative Project, and the most recent scientific understanding of relevant climatic changes.

This is a major contribution to our understanding of Neandertal behavior and industry. It adds new dimensions and perspectives based on innovative techniques of analysis. The analytic methods applied to lithic artifacts that form the heart of the book are the product of considerations about how to best interpret a sequence of  multiple contextual samples. The author concludes the book with an extraordinarily useful chapter that places his findings into the larger context of our contemporary knowledge of Neandertal life in the region.

The book comes with a compact disc, which includes coded observations used in the analysis in as many as 47 data fields for the more than 11,500 artifacts that will allow professionals and students to further explore the collection of lithic artifacts.

Stone tools are the most durable and common type of archaeological remain and one of the most important sources of information about behaviors of early hominins. Stone Tools and the Evolution of Human Cognition develops methods for examining questions of cognition, demonstrating the progression of mental capabilities from early hominins to modern humans through the archaeological record.

Dating as far back as 2.5-2.7 million years ago, stone tools were used in cutting up animals, woodworking, and preparing vegetable matter. Today, lithic remains give archaeologists insight into the forethought, planning, and enhanced working memory of our early ancestors. Contributors focus on multiple ways in which archaeologists can investigate the relationship between tools and the evolving human mind-including joint attention, pattern recognition, memory usage, and the emergence of language.

Offering a wide range of approaches and diversity of place and time, the chapters address issues such as skill, social learning, technique, language, and cognition based on lithic technology. Stone Tools and the Evolution of Human Cognition will be of interest to Paleolithic archaeologists and paleoanthropologists interested in stone tool technology and cognitive evolution.

University of Utah Anthropological Paper No. 126

The Sunshine Locality in the geographic center of the Great Basin has been the focus of scientific research since the mid-1960s. Authors Charlotte Beck and George T. Jones began studies there in 1992 and carried out excavations between 1993 and 1997 with the assistance of Hamilton College Field School. The area has yielded a rich and varied collection of diagnostic lithic tools, including fluted and unfluted lanceolate projectile points and a crescent, and a variety of gravers, scrapers, notches, and other tools common in Paleoindian toolkits across North America.

This volume provides the first comprehensive treatment that combines historical research with the more recent studies. Analysis and interpretations of the stratigraphic sequence in Sunshine Wash are presented, including analyses of sedimentary textures and structure, depositional processes, and chronology. Faunal remains are used to evaluate local and regional environmental changes. Finally, the authors address the nature of the processes that created the archaeological record at Sunshine Locality, its age, and whether artifacts and remains of extinct mammals also recovered at the site are associated. This work begins to answer unresolved questions about the paleoenvironmental resources of the Sunshine Locality.

Whether done by Stone Age hunters or artisans in ancient civilizations, the transformation of resistant stone into useful implements required skills with a high level of sophistication. Because stone tools are durable, today we have a lithic record to explain past behavior and the evolution of culture over long spans. Interpretive and analytical approaches to the study of stone tools, however, are often treated as independent, disconnected specialties. Works in Stone provides a broad look at the field of lithic analysis by bringing together a cross section of recent research. Scholars present a diverse range of concepts and methods with case studies that extend to every continent and contexts ranging from the Paleolithic to late prehistory. Showcasing the latest research of lithic analysts, Works in Stone provides a cohesive overview of recent methods and conclusions.