Measuring reduction in stone tools: an ethnoarchaeological study of Gamo hidescrapers from Ethiopia

Stone tools were knapped, not built. This truism means that tools were reduced from larger pieces in the production process. But many tools were further reduced in use, to repair damage or as edges dulled. Reduction reduced size (trivially), but also changed the proportions among tools' elements or dimensions. Such allometric variation (change in proportion as a function of change in size) is useful to estimate the degree of reduction that tools experienced. Reduction itself is a measure of curation, a theoretical concept of great interest in lithic studies and Paleolithic archaeology. To determine the reduction that archaeological tools experienced, we must compare their size and proportions at first use to the same properties at discard that we directly measure. By now many size estimates can be made from discarded tools. Some are experimentally tested but few are validated using direct ethnoarchaeological controls. We validate two allometric reduction measures—ratios of plan area to thickness and of an estimate of original to discarded volume—against direct measures of use and reduction in ethnographic Gamo hidescrapers from Ethiopia.     

Archaeological Collections, Government Warehouses, and Anxious Moderns: The Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory

This paper focuses on archaeological curation repositories and their role as more than mere storage facilities. Archaeological collections are increasingly marshaled to confront anxieties about a seemingly ‘vanishing past’ and to arrest its disappearance. In Maryland, the state has invested heavily in a ‘state-of-the-art’ facility to protect and study archaeological collections in its custody. The facility has become the proxy for the collections and a form of cultural property itself, becoming part of the ongoing process that serves to recast this portion of the state as a place rooted in the past.     

Context, curation, and bias: an evaluation of the Middle Paleolithic collections of Combe-Grenal (France)

The site of Combe-Grenal is arguably the reference site for the Mousterian of southwest France. Bordes excavated the site over a period of 13 years and generated a large collection of lithics and fauna from a deep series of 64 Lower and Middle Paleolithic levels. Though Bordes only partially published his work at the site, its long stratigraphic sequence and particularly its collections have been subjected to numerous studies over the years and have figured prominently in several long-running debates concerning the Mousterian. Recently, the authors undertook a project to inventory and analyzed these collections along with the documentation of their archaeological context. In so doing, however, a number of serious problems became apparent with the collection in its current state, problems that cannot easily be resolved given the state of the available documentation. These problems have important implications not only for results of studies based on these collections, but more generally, they also point to problems in terms of how archaeological collections are curated.     

Sickle blade life-history and the transition to agriculture: an early Neolithic case study from Southwest Asia

In Southwest Asia, sickle blades first appear early in the sequence of the transition to agriculture. In the past, detailed qualitative research on silica bearing blade stone tools focus on the characterization of use-wear traces such as polish types and accrual rates. In this paper we approach the study of sickle blades slightly different, choosing to examine tool life-history by developing a method to quantitatively estimate harvesting intensity. The method centers on an experiment of cutting cereal stalks and measuring stone blade edge thickness under a scanning electron microscope as a proxy for cutting time. We end with regressing the experimental results to provide an estimation of how intensively archaeological sickle blades recovered from the site of Dhra’, Jordan were used for harvesting. The results, while preliminary, enable an initial interpretation of sickle blades as important tools with long use-life histories during the early Neolithic in the Southern Levant.     

Art and archive: memory-work on a Montana homestead

Practices of inventory and collection, intended to organise artefacts in systems of conservation and display, may be unable to cope with deposits of ambiguous or degraded matter. The article chronicles the inventory of residual material culture at a homestead in Montana, and the development of a curatorial practice sensitive to the peculiar qualities and resonances of waste things. Critical and creative resources, drawn from contemporary artists who incorporate such matter in their work, catalyse methodological experimentation with the ordering of objects and their histories. Explorations of artful inventory lead to reflections on the relation between place, memory, and the geographical specificity of curatorial practice.