Lithic technology
| The Stone Age |
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↑ before Homo (Pliocene) |
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| ↓ Chalcolithic |
↑ before Homo (Pliocene)
In archeology, lithic technology refers to a broad array of techniques and styles to produce usable tools from various types of stone. The earliest stone tools were recovered from modern Ethiopia and were dated to between two-million and three-million years old. The archaeological record of lithic technology is divided into three major time periods: the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age), Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), and Neolithic (New Stone Age). Not all cultures in all parts of the world exhibit the same pattern of lithic technological development, and stone tool technology continues to be used to this day, but these three time periods represent the span of the archaeological record when lithic technology was paramount. By analysing modern stone tool usage within an ethnoarchaeological context insight into the breadth of factors influencing lithic technologies in general may be studied. See: Stone tool. For example, for the Gamo of Southern Ethiopia, political, environmental, and social factors influence the patterns of technology variation in different subgroups of the Gamo culture; through understanding the relationship between these different factors in a modern context, archaeologists can better understand the ways that these factors could have shaped the technological variation that is present in the archaeological record.
Some types of raw materials are:
These raw materials all have common characteristics which make them ideal for stone tool production. To make a stone material ideal for tool production, it must be non-crystalline or glassy, which allows for conchoidal fracturing. These characteristics allow the person forming the stone ("flintknapper") to control the reduction precisely in order to make a wide variety of tools.
There are numerous factors as to why some raw materials would be chosen over others and can result in the use of low quality materials. A few examples of such factors include the availability of materials, the proximity to materials, and the quality of materials. To help understand this, archaeologists have applied models of risk management to stone artifacts. Theories have suggested that in times of high risk, more effort will be put into acquiring high quality material that is more reliable and can be maintained over longer periods of time. In times of low risk, lower quality materials may be acquired from closer sources. However, Mackay and Marwick (2011) found that this pattern does not always hold true in their application of this theory to the South African Pleistocene record. They then used computer simulations to understand why the relationship between the time put into producing technology and subsistence acquisition would produce the patterns they saw. Mackay and Marwick found that when less time was put into acquiring material for and producing technology, that extra time increased the chances of encounters and thus increases the chances of acquiring more resources in a shorter period of time. This just goes to show that raw material choice is not always straightforward, nor are high quality materials always sought out.
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