Abstract This article aims to revisit the terms ‘Jade Age’ and ‘Bronze in respect Chinese archaeology history. It argues that active exchanges of techniques, ideas, tools between bronze stone producers have blurred definitions these periods proposes we focus more on concrete agents adopts evidence from cold mechanical treatments precious stones bronzes. presents analyzes traces polishing chisel...

Kendale Hecala is located on the Ambar River in Upper Tigris Basin, province of Diyarbakır Southeast Anatolia. Various raw materials, including obsidian, radiolarite, chert, jasper, chalcedony, and quartzite, were used lithic industry. Obsidian artefacts constitute an average 64% chipped stone assemblage. Technological analysis reveals that obsidian was brought to settlement as nodules into var...

Blombos Cave is well known as an important site for understanding the evolution of symbolically mediated behaviours among Homo sapiens during the Middle Stone Age, and during the Still Bay in particular. The lower part of the archaeological sequence (M3 phase) contains 12 layers dating to MIS 5 with ages ranging from 105 to 90 ka ago (MIS 5c to 5b) that provide new perspectives on the technolog...

The earliest fossils of Homo sapiens are reported from in Africa in association with both late Acheulian and Middle Stone Age (MSA) artifacts. The relation between the origin of our species during the later Middle Pleistocene in Africa and the major archaeological shift marked by the Acheulian-MSA transition is therefore a key issue in human evolution, but it has thus far suffered from a lack o...

The fractal distribution is the best statistical model for the size-frequency distributions that result from some lithic reduction processes. Fractals are a large class of complex, self-similar sets that can be described using power-law relations. Fractal statistical distributions are characterized by an exponent, D, called the fractal dimension. I show how to determine whether the size-frequen...

Using a database of 499 archaeological assemblages from 332 sites in Europe, we statistically test a model of the economic reactivity of the hunter-gatherer production system to climatic variations. This model predicts an increase in the diversity of lithic tools during harsh cold periods, in order to maintain carrying capacity, and a reduction during favorable climatic periods. Diversity was m...

In this paper we examine ways to predict the distribution of siliceous rock in Europe, using a Bayesian technique known as ‘Weights-of-Evidence’. We use the technique to classify bedrock geological formations in terms of their likelihood of yielding tool-quality lithic raw materials, and we use the results to reexamine possible causes of a west–east cline in maximum lithic raw material transfer...

Solutrean culture has been interpreted as a response to the Last Glacial Maximum in western Europe. However, to establish a link depends of our knowledge of the impact of global climatic changes at a local level and of the differential preservation and significance of the record. The identification of lithic sources, technology, function, and place of discard, is an effective way to mitigate so...

Introduction: Lunar meteorite Dhofar 961, a complex, lithic-clast-rich impact breccia [1,2], was called out by [3-6] as a candidate for an origin in the South Pole – Aitken (SPA) Basin region of the Moon (the SPA Terrane) on the basis of its relatively mafic, but nonmare lithologic and major-element chemical composition. It also has an incompatible-element signature that differs from the KREEP-...