CHAPTER 7 Late Archaic Stone Tool Technology across the Borderlands

2005 ◽  
pp. 187-218
Author(s):  
Bradley J. Vierra
Keyword(s):  
Stone Tool ◽  
Late Archaic ◽  
Tool Technology

Mode 3 Technologies and the Evolution of Modern Humans

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Foley ◽  
Marta Mirazón Lahr
Keyword(s):  
Strong Association ◽  
Middle Stone Age ◽  
Stone Tool ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
African Origin ◽  
Biological Models ◽  
Modern Humans ◽  
Archaeological Interpretation ◽  
Mode 3 ◽  
Tool Technology

The origins and evolution of modern humans has been the dominant interest in palaeoanthropology for the last decade, and much archaeological interpretation has been structured around the various issues associated with whether humans have a recent African origin or a more ancient one. While the archaeological record has been used to support or refute various aspects of the theories, and to provide a behavioural framework for different biological models, there has been little attempt to employ the evidence of stone tool technology to unravel phylogenetic relationships. Here we examine the evidence that the evolution of modern humans is integrally related to the development of the Upper Palaeolithic and similar technologies, and conclude that there is only a weak relationship. In contrast there is a strong association between the evolution and spread of modern humans and Grahame Clark's Mode 3 technologies (the Middle Stone Age/Palaeolithic). The implications of this for the evolution of Neanderthals, the multiple pattern of human dispersals, and the nature of cognitive evolution, are considered.

Evolution of Cognitive Archaeology through Evolving Cognitive Systems

2019 ◽  
pp. 79-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Original Work ◽  
Stone Tools ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Stone Tool ◽  
Cognitive Systems ◽  
Cognitive Evolution ◽  
Subsequent Work ◽  
Productive Research ◽  
Tool Technology

Tom Wynn’s original work that looked at the evolution of stone tool technology using Piaget’s developmental sequence was the beginning of productive research into the evolution of hominin and human cognition. In this chapter, I evaluate those beginnings and discusses recent attempts to provide a more satisfactory understanding of changes in stone tool technologies, including work by Philip Barnard and William McGrew, subsequent work by Tom Wynn, and my own work with various collaborators. It suggests that some of the previous understandings of cognitive evolution were shaped by the fact that approaches to stone tools were largely determined in the nineteenth century. I propose some new ways of looking at stone tools and the sort of story that allows for more productive models of the evolution of human cognition.

Plio-Quaternary palaeoenvironments in West Turkana (East African Rift System; Kenya): palaeolake fluctuations, palaeolandscapes and controlling factors

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexis Nutz ◽  
Mathieu Schuster ◽  
Doris Barboni ◽  
Ghislain Gassier ◽  
Jean-François Ghienne ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
East African Rift ◽  
Depositional Environments ◽  
Sediment Supply ◽  
Stone Tool ◽  
Rift System ◽  
East African Rift System ◽  
East African ◽  
The West ◽  
African Rift ◽  
Tool Technology

<p>The Turkana Depression consists of several Oligocene to Pliocene North-South oriented half-grabens that connect the Ethiopian and Kenyan rift valleys within the eastern branch of the Cenozoic East African Rift System. In the northern portion of the Turkana Depression, exposed on the west side of modern Lake Turkana, is the Nachukui Formation that consists of a > 700 m pile of fluvial-deltaic-lacustrine sediments deposited between 4.2 and 0.7 Ma. The Nachukui Fm is a world-class fossil-bearing succession into which more than 500 hominin fossils were discovered, including major discoveries for the understanding of Human evolution and more than 100 archaeological sites. Most significant discoveries include <em>Australopithecus anamensis</em>, <em>Kenyanthropus platyops</em>, <em>Paranthropus aethiopicus</em>, <em>Paranthropus boisei</em> and specimens of <em>Homo</em> (i.e., <em>H. rudolfensis</em> and <em>H. erectus</em>) and early members of <em>H. sapiens</em>, as well as the earliest evidence of Acheulean stone tool technology and, more recently, the most primitive Lomekwian stone tool technology.</p><p>            Palaeoenvironmental changes may have had a strong influence on evolution, including that of the human lineage. However, in the Turkana Depression, palaeoenvironments are still very partially reconstructed and the respective role of climate and tectonism is still debated. Here, we used the interpretation of depositional environments, the delineation of depositional sequences and a record of d<sup>13</sup>C in pedogenic carbonates (i.e. paleovegetation proxy) to reconstruct 1) palaeolake Turkana fluctuations between ca. 4 and ca. 1.2 Ma and 2) the successive sedimentary palaeoenvironments and resulting landscapes that characterized the West Turkana area during the same time interval.</p><p>            Facies and sequence analyses reveal that palaeolake Turkana experienced eight low-frequency transgression-regression (T-R) cycles between ca. 4 and ca. 1.2 Ma; superimposed lower amplitude and shorter duration T-R cycles are also locally identified revealing subordinate-order fluctuations. In the same time, two different palaeolandscapes (labelled type-1 and type-2) alternated through times revealing variations in sediment supply coming from the western rift shoulder. A statistical treatment of the d<sup>13</sup>C record using a modified k-mean clustering allows us to confront a paleovegetation proxy and the sedimentological record. This combined approach reveals that the evolution of rainfall over the Ethiopian dome (i.e., drainage basin of the Omo river) controlled long-term palaeolake Turkana fluctuations during the Plio-Quaternary period while tectonism likely controlled the occurrence of different palaeolandscapes in West Turkana forced by changes in the rate of sediment supply.</p><p>            Finally, our study shows that traditional methods of basin geology (i.e., facies and sequence analysis) are key tools to provide large-scale paleolandscape reconstructions and palaeolake fluctuations needed for investigating the interactions between hominins and palaeoenvironments. Such a powerful procedure, however, is rare for hominins sites and has yet to be integrated in the workflow utilized by the paleontology and archeology communities.</p><p>This is a contribution of the Rift Lake Sedimentology project (RiLakS).</p>

Late Middle Pleistocene Levallois stone-tool technology in southwest China

Nature ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 565 (7737) ◽  
pp. 82-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yue Hu ◽  
Ben Marwick ◽  
Jia-Fu Zhang ◽  
Xue Rui ◽  
Ya-Mei Hou ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Southwest China ◽  
Stone Tool ◽  
Middle Pleistocene ◽  
Tool Technology ◽  
Late Middle Pleistocene

scholarly journals Author Correction: Two million years of flaking stone and the evolutionary efficiency of stone tool technology

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 312-316
Author(s):  
Željko Režek ◽  
Harold L. Dibble ◽  
Shannon P. McPherron ◽  
David R. Braun ◽  
Sam C. Lin
Keyword(s):  
Stone Tool ◽  
Tool Technology

The ‘Lower Perigordian’ in French Archaeology

1966 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 156-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas F. Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Stone Tool ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Upper Palaeolithic ◽  
French Word ◽  
Material Artifacts ◽  
Tool Technology ◽  
Geological Context

An evaluation of the concept of ‘Lower Perigordian‘ is attempted in this paper. The conclusion of this work suggests that the Lower Perigordian is a fallacious concept, that it can no longer be accepted as the first stage of the French Upper Palaeolithic, and that the so-called Lower Perigordian stone industries may not even represent a unified stage in the development of stone-tool technology.The terms ‘industry’ and ‘assemblage’ will be used in this paper in the sense defined by Braidwood (1946, 133–6). An industry is a collection of tools of one category of material (here stone or bone only) which appears in archaeological context, or in an untransported geological context. An assemblage is ‘… a variety of categories of artifacts and non-artifactual materials which appears in archaeological context.’ The non-artifactual aspect of an assemblage most notably provides information on geological context and physical relationships. Many of the collections of tools to be dealt with below can in no way be considered assemblages, but we still know something of their archaeological contexts, so they have not yet sunk to the level of Braidwood's ‘aggregations’. ‘Culture’ will be used in its anthropological sense to mean the whole of patterned, learned behaviour shared by a group of human beings, and the effects of this behaviour on material artifacts. If set off by quotation marks, ‘culture’ may refer also to the ‘material culture’ of other writers or be a convenient translation of the French word ‘civilization.’

OPINIONS ON THE LOWLAND MAYA LATE ARCHAIC PERIOD WITH SOME EVIDENCE FROM NORTHERN BELIZE

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 461-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert M. Rosenswig
Keyword(s):  
Extended Period ◽  
Spatial Separation ◽  
Interesting Case ◽  
Archaic Period ◽  
Stone Tool ◽  
Soil Horizon ◽  
Late Archaic ◽  
Maya Lowlands ◽  
Southern Mexico ◽  
Village Life

AbstractThe fourth millennium b.p. in the Maya lowlands provides an interesting case, with mobile, aceramic peoples documented, while ceramic-using villagers lived in other parts of Mesoamerica. Rather than ask why ceramic containers and village life took so long to reach the Maya lowlands, the question can be inverted to posit that a mixed horticultural-foraging adaptation was so effective that it persisted longer than elsewhere. I propose that the so-called 4.2 ka b.p. event was the ultimate cause of increased sedentism and the first adoption of ceramic containers in a limited number of regions of Mesoamerica. My musings are grounded in the comparisons of data from the Soconusco region of southern Mexico and evidence from northern Belize at Colha and Pulltrouser Swamp, as well as the Freshwater Creek drainage. I assume that proximate behavior must account for local adaptations and different rates of change in each region of Mesoamerica. Therefore, regional adaptation in northern Belize during the Late Archaic period provides the evidence with which to reconstruct local adaptation. Excavations and regional reconnaissance document a distinctive orange soil horizon at Progresso Lagoon associated with patinated chert tools and an absence of ceramics. Stone tool assemblages from the preceramic components of three sites in the region indicate a spatial separation of tool use and resharpening at island versus shore. Starch grains recovered from these stone tools indicate that preceramic peoples in northern Belize harvested maize and several other domesticated plant species. These data are consistent with local paleoenvironmental studies that document an extended period of horticultural activity during the fifth and fourth millennia b.p. prior to the adoption of ceramics. Lithic assemblages and associated dietary information from multiple sites provide glimpses of the data necessary to reconstruct Late Archaic period adaptation from a single locale. Such data will be required to understand the proximate causes for the transition to a more settled, village life.

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