Backed Pieces and Their Variability in the Later Stone Age of the Horn of Africa
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Backed Pieces and Their Variability in the Later Stone Age of the Horn of Africa Alice Leplongeon & Clément Ménard & Vincent Bonhomme & Eugenio Bortolini
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Backed pieces became widespread in the Upper Pleistocene and Holocene and are part of the classic definitions for the Later Stone Age in many parts of Africa. However, the association of backed pieces with Later Stone Age is not clear in the Horn of Africa. These pieces are present in both Middle Stone Age (MSA) and Later Stone Age (LSA) contexts. To what extent was the “backing phenomenon” homogeneous or diverse between and within the two periods? Here, we start with a review of the literature on backed pieces in the Horn of
Africa, noting the lack of terminological consensus and the absence of a shared typology in the region. We then describe the variability of backed pieces using two complementary approaches: (1) multivariate statistical analysis on a set of 28 attributes of 188 artifacts from eight securely dated contexts and (2) 2D geometric morphometric analyses on the same dataset. The two approaches provide complementary results, which allow us to identify and discuss the chronological trends in backing technology and morphology, without
Alice Leplongeon and Clément Ménard contributed equally to this work. Archaeological time period: Middle and Later Stone Age Country and region discussed: Horn of Africa Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10437-020-09401-x) contains supplementary material, all supplementary materials are available to anyone interested in it (not only authorized users) at the following https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7825607. A. Leplongeon Department of Archaeology, KU Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200e, 3001 Leuven, Belgium A. Leplongeon Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Bologna, Via Marsala 26, 40126 Bologna, Italy A. Leplongeon (*) UMR Histoire Naturelle de l’Homme Préhistorique (HNHP), Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Université de Perpignan Via Domitia, CNRS, Institut de Paléontologie Humaine, 1 rue Panhard, 75013 Paris, France e-mail: [email protected]
e-mail: [email protected] C. Ménard (*) Centre français des études éthiopiennes, P.O. Box 5554, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia e-mail: [email protected] V. Bonhomme ISEM, Univ Montpellier, CNRS, EPHE, IRD, Montpellier, France E. Bortolini Department of Cultural Heritage, University of Bologna, Via degli Ariani 1, 48121 Ravenna, Italy
Afr Archaeol Rev
introducing a new terminology or proposing a new formal “descriptive” typology. Résumé Les pièces à dos abattu deviennent omniprésentes au Pléistocène récent et à l’Holocène, et sont donc partie intégrante des définitions classiques du Later Stone Age. Cependant, l’association des pièces à dos abattu avec le Later Stone Age est peu claire dans la Corne de l’Afrique. En effet, elles se retrouvent à la fois dans des assemblages Middle Stone Age o
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