Abstract
The utility of the cortex ratio first developed by Dibble et al. (American Antiquity, 70(3), 545–560, 2005) and extended by Douglass et al. (American Antiquity, 73(3), 513–526, 2008) is examined in contexts where cores rather than flakes may be transported. The cortex ratio is used to demonstrate the movement of artifacts by quantifying missing surface area, typically where it is the flakes that were removed and the cores that were left behind. In such situations, the removal of flakes with small volumes will result in the removal of relatively large cortical surface areas resulting in a low cortex ratio. However, when it is the cores that were removed, assemblages will lose greater proportions of artifact volume relative to the loss of artifact surface area. Here, we propose methods to investigate the effects of high-volume artifact removal from archeological assemblages as a proxy for human movement in addition to the cortex ratio. We apply the methods to stone artifact assemblages from the Fayum, Egypt, where changes in mid-Holocene mobility are closely linked to food production.
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Acknowledgments
Work reported here was supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand through a Marsden grant, by the National Geographic Society, and by the University of Auckland. Permission to work on the Fayum material was provided by the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities to the UCLA, Groningen University, University of Auckland Fayum Project (URU). We thank Willeke Wendrich, Matthew Douglass, Sam Lin, and Josh Emmitt for their comments on the paper. Briar Sefton drew the figures.
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Phillipps, R.S., Holdaway, S.J. Estimating Core Number in Assemblages: Core Movement and Mobility During the Holocene of the Fayum, Egypt. J Archaeol Method Theory 23, 520–540 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-015-9250-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-015-9250-2