Experiencing stone tool making at Iwajuku Museum

Speech, stone tool-making and the evolution of language

The 'technological hypothesis' proposes that gestural language evolved in early hominins to enable the cultural transmission of stone tool-making skills, with speech appearing later in response to the complex lithic industries of more recent hominins. However, no flintknapping study has assessed the efficiency of speech alone (unassisted by gesture) as a tool-making transmission aid. Here we sh...

Quantifying Oldowan Stone Tool Production at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania

Recent research suggests that variation exists among and between Oldowan stone tool assemblages. Oldowan variation might represent differential constraints on raw materials used to produce these stone implements. Alternatively, variation among Oldowan assemblages could represent different methods that Oldowan producing hominins utilized to produce these lithic implements. Identifying differenti...

A Note on Museum Making III

Rememberer: A Tool for Capturing Museum Visits

We report on our experiences implementing and testing Rememberer, a tool for recording visits to museums. We describe field trials at the Exploratorium, an interactive science museum in San Francisco. This challenging environment enabled us to verify that Rememberer interferes little with the social, hands-on nature of Exploratorium visits and has promise as a vehicle for post-visit reflection ...

A museum - oriented authoring tool 1 Alessandro

The multimedial capacities of the last generation computers meet the needs of the recent, new impulse to catalogue, restore and preserve the archaeological patrimony. In this paper we propose an easy-to-use authoring tool suitable to a) help the user in setting up an exhibition or a museum in such a way to match different criteria and satisfy user-defined or structure constraints; and b) prepar...