Towards an understanding of retouch flakes: A use-wear blind test on knapped stone microdebitage.

ABSTRACT: The retouching and resharpening of lithic tools during their production and maintenance leads to the production of large numbers of small flakes and chips known as microdebitage. Standard analytical approaches to this material involves the mapping of microartefact densities to identify activity areas, and the creation of techno-typologies to characterise the form of retouch flakes from different types of tools. Whilst use-wear analysis is a common approach to the analysis of tools, it has been applied much less commonly to microdebitage. This paper contends that the use-wear analysis of microdebitage holds great potential for identifying activity areas on archaeological sites, representing a relatively unexplored analytical resource within microartefact assemblages. In order to test the ra

SUBMITTER: Chan B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7721188 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature