A Technological and Typological Analysis of Lithic Material from Skovmosen I, Denmark

 During road construction work, material attributed to the Final Palaeolithic was discovered at Skovmosen I, near Kongens Lyngby on Zealand, eastern Denmark. Although it is regularly mentioned in reviews of the southern Scandinavian Final Palaeolithic, the Skovmosen I assemblage has hitherto remained poorly described. We here review the site’s discovery history and its context. Aided by a three-dimensional digital recording protocol, this article details the assemblage composition and its technology. The assemblage is comprised of tanged points, scrapers and burins, alongside blades and cores as primary reduction products. Although evidently disturbed by the road construction that led to the site’s discovery, the material likely reflects the remains of a small Final Palaeolithic locale, where diverse activities were carried out

Novel Geometric Morphometric (GMM) Application to the Study of Bronze Age Tutuli

In this paper, we examine the morphological diversity of the tutuli object group from the earlier Nordic Bronze Age (henceforth NBA) – an often over-looked object group despite their abundance specially, temporally and contextually. Currently, only a few studies of the morphological diversity of tutuli have been published, and these consist primarily of decade-old-typologies. The objective of this of this paper is first and foremost methodological, as we examine two research questions – concerning classification and periodisation – through a novel two-dimensional geometric morphometric (henceforth GMM) framework and subsequent multivariate analysis. Inherently we examine whether specific shapes conform to the classificatory of the Montelius typology, and whether a temporal relationship exists between types and shapes

Book review: The Emergence of Pressure Blade Making (Pierre M. Desrosiers)

This is a book review on the co-edited volume dedicated to the manufacture of pressure blade making entitled "The Emergence of Pressure Blade Making"

All these Fantastic Cultures? Research History and Regionalization in the Late Palaeolithic Tanged Point Cultures of Eastern Europe

The Late Glacial, that is the period from the first pronounced warming after the Last Glacial Maximum to the beginning of the Holocene (c. 16,000-11,700 cal bp), is traditionally viewed as a time when northern Europe was being recolonized and Late Palaeolithic cultures diversified. These cultures are characterized by particular artefact types, or the co-occurrence or specific relative frequencies of these. In north-eastern Europe, numerous cultures have been proposed on the basis of supposedly different tanged points. This practice of naming new cultural units based on these perceived differences has been repeatedly critiqued, but robust alternatives have rarely been offered. Here, we review the taxonomic landscape of Late Palaeolithic large tanged point cultures in eastern Europe as currently envisaged, which leads us to be cautious about the epistemological validity of many of the constituent groups. This, in turn, motivates us to investigate the key artefact class, the large tanged point, using geometric morphometric methods. Using these methods, we show that distinct groups are difficult to recognize, with major implications for our understanding of patterns and processes of culture change in this period in north-eastern Europe and perhaps elsewhere

Towards an understanding of retouch flakes: A use-wear blind test on knapped stone microdebitage

The retouching and resharpening of lithic tools during their production and maintenance leads to the production of large numbers of small flakes and chips known as microdebitage. Standard analytical approaches to this material involves the mapping of microartefact densities to identify activity areas, and the creation of techno-typologies to characterise the form of retouch flakes from different types of tools. Whilst use-wear analysis is a common approach to the analysis of tools, it has been applied much less commonly to microdebitage. This paper contends that the use-wear analysis of microdebitage holds great potential for identifying activity areas on archaeological sites, representing a relatively unexplored analytical resource within microartefact assemblages. In order to test the range of factors that affect the identification of use-wear traces on small retouch flakes, a blind test consisting of 40 retouch flakes was conducted. The results show that wear traces can be identified with comparable levels of accuracy to those reported for historic blind tests of standard lithic tools suggesting that the use-wear analysis of retouch flakes can be a useful analytical tool in understanding site function, and in increasing sample sizes in cases where assemblages contain few tools.BC Grant Number: 328642 Funder: European Commission FP7 Marie Curie Actions Intra-European Fellowship programme - Grant Number: AH/N007506/1 Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) - Grant Number: HAR2016-75201-P Funder: Ministry of Science and Innovation, Spain - Grant Number: AH/L503939/1 Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) through the South West and Wales Doctoral TrainingPeer reviewe