A technological investigation of biface origins in Africa: A novel geometric morphometric approach.

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

I will investigate biface origins at the start of the Acheulean: a technology which persists for 1.5 million years, coincidingwith a large increase in hominin brain size. As outlined in my research proposal, there are two main theories for itsappearance: use as cutting tools (particularly in butchery) and use as cores (to produce a greater number of flakes pervolume of raw material than preceding pebble cores). One advocate of this latter theory suggests that bifaces and pebblecores can be placed on the same sliding scale of size and elongation (Shea 2010), which would make bifaces allometricextensions of existing technologies. A logical corollary of this is that early Acheulean assemblages should show acontinuous range of variation in core technology, from simple pebble-cores to bifaces, not discrete breaks. I plan to testthis using 3D geometric morphometrics within early Acheulean assemblages. Furthermore, I will also carry outexperimental work to fill existing gaps in the literature. I wish to quantify the differences in number of useable flakes pervolume of core between pebble-cores and bifaces, as well as morphological differences in the flakes of each. Finally, Iwill investigate the differences in cutting ability between bifaces and pebble-cores, because the latter possess many ofthe characteristics that make bifaces good cutting tools, yet this has not been investigated. Similarities would underminean initial role for bifaces in cutting tasks.