Archaeology, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom.
Laboratory for Material Culture Studies, Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands.
PLoS One. 2020 Dec 7;15(12):e0243101. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0243101. eCollection 2020.
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.
在石器工具的制作和维护过程中，对石器进行修饰和再磨锐会产生大量的小石片和碎屑，这些被称为微片。对这种材料的标准分析方法包括将微石器密度映射到识别活动区域，并创建技术类型学来描述来自不同类型工具的锐变石片的形式。虽然使用痕迹分析是工具分析的常用方法，但它在微片分析中的应用却相对较少。本文认为，微片的使用痕迹分析在确定考古遗址的活动区域方面具有很大的潜力，代表了微石器组合中一个相对未被探索的分析资源。为了测试影响小锐变石片上使用痕迹识别的一系列因素，进行了一项由 40 个锐变石片组成的盲测。结果表明，磨损痕迹的识别精度可以与历史上对标准石器进行的盲测报告的精度相媲美，这表明锐变石片的使用痕迹分析可以成为理解遗址功能的有用分析工具，并在组合中工具较少的情况下增加样本量。
