The Effects of Secondary Recycling on the Technological Character of Lithic Assemblages
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The Effects of Secondary Recycling on the Technological Character of Lithic Assemblages Emily Coco 1
& Simon
Holdaway 2
& Radu
Iovita 1
# Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Recycling of lithic artifacts, including both lithic scavenging and secondary recycling, is a widely recognized phenomenon in the Paleolithic archeological record, in some instances creating tools with morphological signatures characteristic of multiple time periods or technological systems. These types of tools often define transitional industries including those at the Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition, suggesting a variety of behavioral interpretations for the supposed evolution of Middle Paleolithic to Upper Paleolithic toolkits. Here we test an alternative hypothesis that transitional assemblages formed via secondary recycling of stone artifacts produced by two technologically divergent populations. Results from the application of an agent-based model indicate how ordered sets of assemblages resembling archeological transitional sequences can result from the combination of simple recycling behaviors and periods of sediment deposition and erosion. This implies that some transitional assemblages could have formed without the interaction of different populations and/or without technological evolution. Keywords Lithic recycling . Lithic scavenging . Transitional industries . Agent-based
modeling
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s41982-02000055-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Emily Coco [email protected] Simon Holdaway [email protected] Radu Iovita [email protected]
1
Center for the Study of Human Origins, Department of Anthropology, New York University, 25 Waverly Pl, New York, NY 10003, USA
2
School of Social Sciences, University of Auckland, Auckland 1142, New Zealand
Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology
Lithic artifacts were recycled throughout prehistory in many areas of the globe (Amick 2007, 2015; Assaf et al. 2015; Baena Preysler et al. 2015; Barkai 1999; Barkai et al. 2015; Belfer-Cohen and Bar-Yosef 2015; Camilli 1988; Gravina and Discamps 2015; Hiscock 2009, 2015; Shafer and Hester 1991; Shimelmitz 2015; Turq et al. 2013; Vaquero 2011; Vaquero et al. 2012, 2015; Whyte 2014). However, because of difficulties in identification, recycling as a process receives comparatively little attention in the archeological literature (Vaquero 2011). This is problematic because recycling has the potential to affect chronological and compositional assessments of assemblages by creating misleading associations between items that were not used together in the same space or time (Amick 2015; Camilli and Ebert 1992). Recycling can also cause a spatial displacement and fragmentation of reduction sequences, sometimes with preferential selection of specific shapes and sizes for recycling (Belfer-Cohen and Bar-Yosef 2015; Vaquero et al. 2015). Secondary recycling (as distinguished from reuse) involves a functional change t
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