TY - JOUR
T1 - Ontogenetic scaling and lithic systematics
T2 - method and application
AU - Ioviţǎ, Radu
N1 - Funding Information:
Funding for carrying out the present research was provided by the National Science Foundation (U.S.A.), grant BCS#0624962, the Kolb Foundation, and the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences and Department of Anthropology. I wish to thank the following people for their guidance and support during the research and writing of this article: Tim Weaver (University of California, Davis, U.S.A.), Harold L. Dibble, Deborah Olszewski, and Philip Chase Theodore Schurr (University of Pennsylvania, U.S.A.), and Shannon McPherron (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany), as well as three anonymous reviewers. I would also like to thank the following people, who made changes to various pieces of software or helped out with writing code: Robert K. Edgar (Cartesian Diatom), F. James Rohlf (tpsDig2), Shannon McPherron, Sanmay Das, and Jeffrey Enos. The data were collected with the permission and hospitality of Victor Chabai, Andrey Veselsky, Alexandr Yevtushenko (National Academy of Sciences of the Ukraine, Crimean Branch), Larysa Kulakovska (National Museum, Kiev, Ukraine), and Jürgen Richter (University of Cologne, Germany) for the Crimean collections; of Christoph Züchner and Leif Steguweit (University of Erlangen, Germany), and Irina Görner (Hessisches Landesmuseum Kassel, Germany) for the German collections; of Alain Turq, Jean-Jacques Cleyet-Merle (Musée National de Préhistoire, Les-Eyzies-de-Tayac, France) for the Pech I and Le Moustier collections, of Jean Airvaux (Service Régional de l'Archéologie du Poitou-Charente, Poitiers, France) for the Jonzac collections, and finally, of Alain Turq, Harold Dibble, Shannon McPherron, and Dennis Sandgathe (Simon Fraser University, Canada), who allowed the study of the unpublished collection of Roc de Marsal, layer 4.
PY - 2009/7
Y1 - 2009/7
N2 - Stone tools tend to be classified according to a mix of functional, morphological, and technological attributes. This practice results in confusions when large-scale assemblage comparisons are made with the aim of investigating phylogenetic relationships, as functional and cultural information is aggregated. It is argued here that functional criteria must be assessed separately, and that resharpening, as a uniform, repeated, conscious behavioral process of tool maintenance that indexes use and function, can provide a solution to this problem. The subject of this article is a quantitative method for extracting and comparing resharpening trajectories. The method is an adaptation of ontogenetic scaling methods from biology, and is based on obtaining a mathematical representation of shape and size, and finding a relationship between the two. Elliptical Fourier analysis is applied to stone tool contours in order to extract shape information, and then a series of regressions of shape on size provide trajectory vectors. The angles between these are then calculated and subjected to a variety of multivariate statistical tests. A case study involving several European Middle Paleolithic bifacial and unifacial tool assemblages is presented. The results show that resharpening and maintenance can be independent of morphology and technology, suggesting that there are strong grounds for focusing on functional systematics separately.
AB - Stone tools tend to be classified according to a mix of functional, morphological, and technological attributes. This practice results in confusions when large-scale assemblage comparisons are made with the aim of investigating phylogenetic relationships, as functional and cultural information is aggregated. It is argued here that functional criteria must be assessed separately, and that resharpening, as a uniform, repeated, conscious behavioral process of tool maintenance that indexes use and function, can provide a solution to this problem. The subject of this article is a quantitative method for extracting and comparing resharpening trajectories. The method is an adaptation of ontogenetic scaling methods from biology, and is based on obtaining a mathematical representation of shape and size, and finding a relationship between the two. Elliptical Fourier analysis is applied to stone tool contours in order to extract shape information, and then a series of regressions of shape on size provide trajectory vectors. The angles between these are then calculated and subjected to a variety of multivariate statistical tests. A case study involving several European Middle Paleolithic bifacial and unifacial tool assemblages is presented. The results show that resharpening and maintenance can be independent of morphology and technology, suggesting that there are strong grounds for focusing on functional systematics separately.
KW - Classification
KW - Elliptical Fourier analysis
KW - Lithics
KW - Ontogenetic scaling
KW - Resharpening
KW - Trajectories
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U2 - 10.1016/j.jas.2009.02.008
DO - 10.1016/j.jas.2009.02.008
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:67349226101
SN - 0305-4403
VL - 36
SP - 1447
EP - 1457
JO - Journal of Archaeological Science
JF - Journal of Archaeological Science
IS - 7
ER -