Tools Versus Cores ― Alternative Approaches to Stone Tool Analysis

To cradle these artifacts in your hand is to hold a spark of connection with a past long dark. But is that artifact a tool, used in work and war, or is a core, an object used to make such a tool? These papers address this most basic of questions of archeology, which most admit should have been answered by now. Contributors include evidence from sites in such topics as the situational behavior of the British Lower Paleolithic, truncated and faceted pieces from Jerf al-Ajla, cores-on-flakes from the Levantine Mousterian, the subtleties found in truncated and faceted pieces, carinated tools and cores and their relation to mobility, lithic barbs from Portugal's Upper Paleolithic, core-tool technologies of the early Holocene and tardiglacial periods, stone assemblages of arid Australia, materials approaches in classification, behavioral causes and archeological effects of lithic recycling, alternative typologies, and the cores, tools and priorities of lithic analysis. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Shannon McPherron is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. His interests lie in expanding our understanding of behavioral evolution prior to the arrival of anatomical moderns through the excavation of Paleolithic sites and the analysis of stone tool assemblages. Currently he works in France and in North and East Africa.