Lithic refits as a tool to reinforce postdepositional analysis
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Lithic refits as a tool to reinforce postdepositional analysis Esther López-Ortega 1,2 & Xosé-Pedro Rodríguez-Álvarez 1,2 & Andreu Ollé 1,2 & Sergi Lozano 1,2 Received: 30 March 2018 / Accepted: 31 January 2019 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Studies of archaeological assemblages recovered from palimpsests encounter difficulties related not only to their nature (the preservation of the remains), but also to the formation of the accumulation itself: the evidence of the different human occupations that the accumulation contains and its temporal resolution. Layer TD10.1 of Gran Dolina (Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain) is a 1-m-thick palimpsest from which 48,000 faunal remains and more than 21,000 lithic artefacts have been recovered. Several interdisciplinary studies have shown that TD10.1 is not the result of an intense and long-term occupation of the cavity, but rather the consequence of several repeated occupation events. Additionally, micro-morphological analyses demonstrate that there were only minimal postdepositional disturbances of the sedimentary context containing the artefacts. This paper presents results obtained from the study of lithic refits in a sample from the TD10.1 assemblage, posing the hypothesis that the position and relative distance separating the refitted elements show that they were in fact found in primary position. While in other cases, Braw material units^ have been used as a tool to distinguish activity areas and occupational episodes, in this study we use refits to learn about the possible movement—or lack thereof—of the artefacts within the area of the site due to postdepositional factors. The use of refits is proposed as a support or supplement to other kinds of analyses of the postdepositional processes that affect the formation of archaeological layers. Keywords Lithic artefacts . Refits . Postdepositional processes . Middle Pleistocene . Gran Dolina
Introduction Traditionally, geologists and micro-morphologists have conducted studies predominantly on the formation and deformation of archaeological deposits. They detected disruptions, alterations and postdepositional processes that affected the archaeological deposits by plotting geological and sedimentary elements and studying the archaeosedimentary succession by means of petrographic thin sections. In some of these studies, sedimentary fabric analyses, which look at the strike and dip angle range of sedimentary components such as clasts, detect preferential orientations and spatial distribution patterns that are the result of different postdepositional processes.
* Esther López-Ortega [email protected]; [email protected] 1
Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES), Zona Educacional 4, Campus Sescelades URV (Edifici W3), 43007 Tarragona, Spain
2
Àrea de Prehistòria, Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV), Avinguda de Catalunya 35, 43002 Tarragona, Spain
Although originally the fabric analysis of blocks and natural pebbles was developed and emp
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