Bones of recent mammals in the Amboseli Basin, southern Kenya, exhibit distinctive weathering characteristics that can be related to the time since death and to the local conditions of temperature, humidity and soil chemistry. A categorization of weathering characteristics into six stages, recognizable on descriptive criteria, provides a basis for investigation of weathering rates and processes. The time necessary to achieve each successive weathering stage has been calibrated using known-age carcasses. Most bones decompose beyond recognition in 10 to 15 yr. Bones of animals under 100 kg and juveniles appear to weather more rapidly than bones of large animals or adults. Small-scale rather than widespread environmental factors seem to have greatest influence on weathering characteristics and rates. Bone weathering is potentially valuable as evidence for the period of time represented in recent or fossil bone assemblages, in- cluding those on archeological sites, and may also be an important tool in censusing populations of animals in modern ecosystems.

Taphonomic and Ecologic Information Form Bone Weathering

Bayesian models have proved very powerful in analyzing large datasets of radiocarbon (14C) measurements from specific sites and in regional cultural or political models. These models require the prior for the underlying processes that are being described to be defined, including the distribution of underlying events. Chronological information is also incorporated into Bayesian models used in DNA research, with the use of Skyline plots to show demographic trends. Despite these advances, there remain difficulties in assessing whether data conform to the assumed underlying models, and in dealing with the type of artifacts seen in Sum plots. In addition, existing methods are not applicable for situations where it is not possible to quantify the underlying process, or where sample selection is thought to have filtered the data in a way that masks the original event distribution. In this paper three different approaches are compared: “Sum” distributions, postulated undated events, and kernel density approaches. Their implementation in the OxCal program is described and their suitability for visualizing the results from chronological and geographic analyses considered for cases with and without useful prior information. The conclusion is that kernel density analysis is a powerful method that could be much more widely applied in a wide range of dating applications.

/pdf/methods-for-summarizing-radiocarbon-datasets-1btxtkvu51.pdf

Methods for Summarizing Radiocarbon Datasets

Andrefsky, Jr., William. 1994 Raw Material Availability and the Organization of Technology. American Antiquity 59:21‑35.

Raw-Material Availability and the Organization of Technology

Archaeologists frequently explain tool curation by its efficiency. Such explanations ignore the fact that curation is a complex activity and that its component parts are efficient in different ways. I argue that the nature and distribution of lithic resources critically affect technological efficiency and I discuss two aspects of curation, maintenance and recycling, asserting that they are responses to raw material shortages. Shortages result from regional geological conditions and from behavior patterns that restrict access to raw material in certain contexts. Ethnographic and archaeological examples support this hypothesis and highlight the relationship between subsistence-settlement organization, raw material distribution, and technology.

Technological Efficiency and Tool Curation

Hunter-gatherer adaptations to long-term fluctuations in regional resource structure require mechanisms to cope with periodic subsistence stresses. Among documented groups, a common response to such stress is temporary movement into adjacent occupied areas-moving in with "relatives" when things go wrong. However, in the case of early (ca. 12,000-10,000 B.P.) Paleoindian groups in the Americas, the availability of neighboring groups with a detailed knowledge of local resource geography could not be relied upon. Post-Pleistocene environmental changes and the low initial population of the New World are important factors conditioning a lifeway characterized by a dependence on hunting (though not exclusively of megafauna), and by high residential, logistical, and range (territorial) mobility. Early Paleoindian groups had to adopt a subsistence technology that could be employed regardless of the specific resource microstructure. In some regards, Paleoindians seem to have behaved like tropical foragers while in others like arctic collectors. Use of high quality lithic raw materials from large quarry sources, reliance on a bifacial technology, limited use of caves and rockshelters, and a low level of processing of food products for storage all may be indicative of such a subsistence technology, which would have been unlike that of any modern hunter-gatherers.

Coming into the Country: Early Paleoindian Hunting and Mobility

Recent research has identified a number of general factors with important effects on flaked-stone technology but has been less effective in solving the problem of examining these factors in specific archaeological contexts. This paper discusses this issue and presents a case study focused on mobility patterns in one area of coastal California to exemplify one approach to dealing with it. This study emphasizes the importance of considering, first, the ways in which local conditions mediate the effects of global aspects of human adaptations and, second, the interactions between multiple causal factors as conditioners of technology. This example highlights the role played by multiple, distinct technological strategies within a single pattern of activity as well as the potential ambiguity of the relations between these strategies and global mobility patterns.

Technological Organization and Hunter-Gather Land Use: a California Example

Recent theoretical studies of flaked stone technology have identified many factors that affect the ways in which human beings make and use tools. However, these studies lack a unified body of theory that might help to integrate their diverse perspectives. This paper expands recent anthropological discussions of risk as the basis for such a theory. We begin by defining risk, emphasizing two distinct components of this concept-the probability that some problem will occur and the cost of such an occurrenceand argue that technology can be seen as a means of reducing such probabilities in the face of unacceptably high costs. We support this argument using cross-cultural data on hunter-gatherer technology and archaeological and historic data on the construction of defensive works on the northern Great Plains. Next, we consider specific problems in applying this perspective archaeologically, concluding that existing limits on our ability to estimate failure probabilities and costs prevent us from testing the ideas outlined here in archaeological contexts. However, accepting this perspective as provisionally validated by ethnographic data allows us to see how it can illuminate archaeological cases, and we exemplify this by comparing the production of Araya microblade projectile points in the Japanese Paleolithic and Folsom fluted projectile points on the North American Great Plains.

Technology, Flaked Stone Technology, and Risk

This paper introduces the volume by considering what skill is and how archaeologists have looked at issues of skill in stone tool production, along with anthropological and archaeological approaches to the ways in which individuals become skilled craftworkers. Archaeological studies of flintknapping skill tend to be isolated from most larger debates, but both the archaeological and the nonarchaeological literature highlight how intimately skill and craft learning are woven into the fabric of society, although they also highlight significant methodological and interpretive issues.

http://img2.tapuz.co.il/forums/1_127361419.pdf

Douglas B. Bamforth

Papers

Technological Efficiency and Tool Curation

Technological Organization and Hunter-Gather Land Use: a California Example

Technology, Flaked Stone Technology, and Risk

Introduction: Archaeological Approaches to Lithic Production Skill and Craft Learning

Lithics: Macroscopic approaches to analysis