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Raw Material and Regionalization in Stone Age Eastern Africa

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Culture History and Convergent Evolution

Part of the book series: Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology ((VERT))

Abstract

Stone tools are the dominant artifact type at Paleolithic sites, and the kinds of stone tools used and their methods of manufacture form some of the richest datasets to assess temporal and geographic patterning in hominin behavior. Using these datasets to compare different lithic assemblages requires comprehensive analytical frameworks that be applied across multiple sites, but this is complicated by the varied nature of the different rock types used in the past. The bedrock lithology of eastern Africa is particularly varied, and we show for a range of Early Pleistocene-to-Holocene-aged archaeological sites that the type and frequency of raw material used, particularly quartz, has significant impacts on a number of typological, technological, and metric variables used to measure variation across time and space, severely weakening our abilities to assess the extent to which past geographic variation in the archaeological record in particular can be attributed to hominin behavior or bedrock geology. Convergence (homoplasy) in particular may be difficult to discern, as even similar behaviors resulting from shared cultural traditions (homology) may result in very different looking artifact types because of the nature of the rock types used.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Huw Groucutt for the opportunity to contribute to this volume, Jess McNeil for the crescent measurements from Occurrence D from the R. M. Gramly excavations at site GvJm22, Lukenya Hill, Tyler Faith, who helped clarify some of our thinking about the relationship between quartz and backed microlithic crescents, and Manuel Will for some of the inspiration to write it. We thank the reviewers’ comments for improving the quality of this manuscript. Research that contributed to this paper was conducted in Kenya by Tryon under research permits MOEST/13/001/30C229, NCST/5/002/R/576 and by Ranhorn in Tanzania under research permits COSTECH 2015-120-NA-2015-24, Antiquities 03/2015/2016 ERV3896941, Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority NCAA/D/157/Vol. V/101. Funding for the field and laboratory research presented here was provided by the Leakey Foundation, the National Geographic Society (7994-06 and 8762-10), the US National Science Foundation (BCS-0841530 and BCS-0852609), the American School of Prehistoric Research, and by Harvard University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Connecticut, 354 Mansfield Rd., Storrs, CT, 06269, USA

    Christian A. Tryon

  2. Institute of Human Origins, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, PO Box 872402, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA

    Kathryn L. Ranhorn

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  1. Extreme Events Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Jena, Germany

    Huw S. Groucutt

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Tryon, C.A., Ranhorn, K.L. (2020). Raw Material and Regionalization in Stone Age Eastern Africa. In: Groucutt, H. (eds) Culture History and Convergent Evolution. Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46126-3_8

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