Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Oldowan
An understanding of the uniquely human behavior of stone tool making tackles questions about hominins’ ability to culturally transmit and expand their base of social and practical knowledge and their cognitive capacities for advanced planning. The appeara
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Thomas W. Plummer Department of Anthropology Queens College, CUNY and NYCEP 65-30 Kissena Blvd Flushing, NY, 11367 USA [email protected]
Peter W. Ditchfield Research Laboratory for Archaeology 6 Keble Road Oxford, OX1 3QT United Kingdom [email protected]
Laura C. Bishop School of Biological and Earth Sciences, Liverpool John Moores University Byrom Street Liverpool, L3 3AF United Kingdom [email protected]
Joseph V. Ferraro Department of Anthropology Baylor University One Bear Place Waco, TX, 76798 USA [email protected]
* Address for correspondence: [email protected] E. Hovers and D.R. Braun (eds.), Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Oldowan, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-9059-2, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009.
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D.R. Braun et al.
Keywords: Stone tools, Oldowan, Raw Materials, Technology
Abstract Advances in the study of Oldowan research have suggested that the earliest tool-makers had the technological capabilities usually suggested in later time periods. Work in West Turkana and Gona research areas suggests that Pliocene hominins had a concise understanding of stone fracture mechanics and had a clear conception of how to reduce cores in a manner that maintained flaking surfaces. Here we investigate if these same patterns existed at the Pliocene site of Kanjera South in Western Kenya. Technological analyses suggest that although many of the technological capabilities described for other Oldowan sites are present in the Kanjera South assemblage, specific aspects of the context of the site (raw material variability) produced a different expression of these behaviors. The most obvious difference between the Kanjera South site and other Oldowan sites is that as reduction continues several different reduction patterns can be seen. This suggests that a reduction sequence or core reduction mode is not an immutable formula and can change depending on its context.
9.1 Introduction The analysis of Oldowan technology has largely been focused on archaeological localities excavated in the East African Rift Valley. The majority of our knowledge of the earliest technology derives from archaeological sites from the Afar region (Kimbel et al. 1996; Semaw et al. 1997; Hovers et al. 2002; Hovers 2003), the Turkana Basin (Isaac 1972; Isaac and Harris 1997; Roche et al. 1999; Delagnes and Roche 2005), and Olduvai Gorge (Leakey 1971; de la Torre and Mora 2005). The Oldowan archaeological locality of Kanjera South is therefore initially important because of its geographic location. Placed between the two major rift valleys in East Africa, in the Kavirondo rift system, the Kanjera South Formation is host to the only site, other than Senga 5 (Harris et al. 1987) and Nyabusosi (Texier 1997), outside the East African rift valley. However, several aspects of the stone artifact collection from Kanjera South make it a vital part of the discussion of resource use and technological decisions in the Pliocene. The collection of artifacts from Kanjera South is one of t
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