Lithic Analysis (4/6333)

Course Description

Stone artifacts, both tools and waste material, are the most abundant archaeological remains. This is particularly true for hunter-gatherer cultures, and for the most ancient of these, stone tools comprise the entire prehistoric record. Any archaeologist of hunter-gatherers, therefore, must be familiar with the analysis of stone tools. We will do this through practice with flintknapping, experimentation, reading, and practice with data generation and analysis. This course will focus on chipped stone rather than groundstone tools, though we will attempt to briefly cover groundstone tool technology towards the end of the semester. Some topics (e.g., blood residue, use-wear, sourcing, trade, specialist production) will not be covered or only covered briefly.

The emphasis will be on the stone tool technology of hunting and gathering peoples and on the practical issues involved in the analysis of debitage (waste flakes) and tools from archaeological sites. This is not a flintknapping course, although students will be introduced to flintknapping in the course’s beginning and are encouraged (expected?) to continue to practice on their own throughout the course. Most of the course will be devoted to an overview of the various kinds of information that can be gleaned from stone tools and debitage, including technological reconstruction and use-wear analysis. Several areas will command our attention: using stone tools to solve anthropological problems, the effects of raw material variability, the analysis of debitage, typology, and measurement issues.


Required Texts

Andrefsky, W. 2005. Lithics: Macroscopic Approaches to Analysis. Cambridge Manuals in Archaeology. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 978-0-521-61500-6

Adams, J.L. 2014. Ground Stone Analysis: A Technological Approach. 2nd ed. University of Utah Press. ISBN: 978-1-607-81273-9.


Additional Readings

All other readings will be posted in PDF form on Canvas.