Researchers who analyze stone tools and their production debris have made significant progress in understanding the relationship between stone tools and human organizational strategies. Stone tools are understood to be morphologically dynamic throughout their use-lives; the ever-changing morphology of stone tools is intimately associated with the needs of tool users. It also has become apparent to researchers that interpretations of lithic analysis are more productive when the unique contexts and situations for which lithic artifacts were made, used, modified, and ultimately discarded are considered. This article reviews the recent literature on stone tool production with an emphasis on raw material procurement, manufacturing techniques, and tool maintenance processes as they relate to adaptive strategies of toolmakers and users.

The Analysis of Stone Tool Procurement, Production, and Maintenance

Rocks are heavy: transport costs and Paleoarchaic quarry behavior in the Great Basin

Mobility plays a large role in generating the patterns of stone rawmaterial usage seen in forager archaeological sites, but how best to translate these patterns into a complete quantitative characterization of the organization of forager mobility remains a difficult problem. The number of potential variables involved, including rawmaterial quality and abundance as well as individual movement and technological decisions, makes it extremely difficult to analyze mobility independent of all other influences. This papers develops a formal model of forager mobility based on a wellknown stochastic process termed a Lvy random walk. When combined with neutral assumptions about how stone is procured and used, the model may be used to recover detailed quantitative information about the organization of forager mobility from rawmaterial transport distances. The model has clear behavioral interpretations in terms of levels of planning, risk sensitivity, and timeenergy optimization and thus provides several potential cu...

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Measuring Forager Mobility

This is a critical review of regional settlement pattern archaeology published in the last decade. The regional approach proves to be highly productive of new ideas and lasting results. Cultural resource/heritage databases are increasingly important. Notable advances have been made in regional studies of Paleolithic and Holocene foragers, the reciprocal relations between Neolithic communities and their regional societies, and in understanding states and empires. There are new research potentials in comparisons, macroregional analysis, long-term change, and alternative pathways. Research designs should specify systematic coverage at the regional scale and carry out spatial analysis in which social groups are the primary focus.

Regional Settlement Pattern Studies

pXRF: a study of inter-instrument performance

Paleoarchaic (11.5–8.0 ka) occupants of the Great Basin encountered numerous lithic sources as they moved across foraging territories. Source provenance and lithic technologic analyses applied to the tools manufactured from these source materials elucidate several aspects of mobility, including the geographic scale of material conveyance and extent and possible routes of population movement. This research indicates that central Great Basin groups traversed large subsistence territories, extending more than 400 km from north to south, with mobility tactics probably keyed to the distribution of resource-rich wetlands. Changes in source representation parallel warming and drying trends, suggesting that Paleoarchaic foraging ranges shifted as wetlands diminished after about 9.5–8.5 ka.

Lithic Source Use and Paleoarchaic Foraging Territories in the Great Basin

Hatch et al. (1990) recently presented the results of research on the sources and ages of obsidian artifacts from four Hopewell sites in Illinois and Ohio. The present comment identifies ambiguities in artifact-to-source attributions that compromise the subsequent source-specific obsidian-hydration objectives of the study. Examination of obsidian-hydration rim-measurement resolution and associated error estimates, disagreements about the validity of laboratory-induced obsidian-hydration rates used in the study, and contradictions between rim measurements on the same specimens lend no support to the authors' conclusion that obsidian was conveyed into these sites throughout the entire temporal duration of Hopewell mound construction.

Another Look at Hopewell Obsidian Studies

The purpose of this paper is to report the occurrence of obsidian artifacts from Early Woodland contexts in southwestern Wisconsin. During 1995 excavations at the Tillmont site (47CR460), seven obsidian flakes were recovered from a deeply buried paleosol in association with a virtually "pure " component of the Indian Isle phase, a local variant of the Early Woodland Marion Culture (Stoltman 1990:242-244). Geochemical analyses of four of the flakes confirm that Obsidian Cliff, Wyoming, was the source, demonstrating that this distinctive material was in use among Woodland peoples of the Midwest several centuries before the commencement of the Hopewell Interaction Sphere.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/4128447

Richard E. Hughes

Papers

Lithic Source Use and Paleoarchaic Foraging Territories in the Great Basin

Another Look at Hopewell Obsidian Studies

Obsidian in early woodland contexts in the upper Mississippi Valley