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Comparing Stone Tool Resharpening Trajectories with the Aid of Elliptical Fourier Analysis

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New Perspectives on Old Stones

Abstract

Resharpening has long played a confusing role in the history of research on lithic variability. In this chapter, I argue that, far from confounding issues of variability, resharpening can be used as a classificatory principle because it reflects human technical choices related to repeated uses of a tool. The advantage that resharpening offers is that of a mathematically suitable study object, through the investigation of shape change along the continuum of size reduction. Building upon a rich history of research in both biology and prehistoric archaeology, I present a variant of a new method for comparing resharpening trajectories, using elliptical Fourier analysis (EFA) and principal components analysis to compare the slopes of allometric regressions. The theoretical presentation is followed by a worked example using bifacial tools from two European Middle Paleolithic sites: Pech de l’Azé I (France) and Buhlen III (Germany).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The elliptical Fourier analysis (EFA) algorithm, invented by Kuhl and Giardina (1982), actually expresses the outline in terms of two functions representing incremental steps in the x and y directions, functions which are then subjected to Fourier analysis themselves.

  2. 2.

    See Iovita (2009) for further details related to the photographing setup, as well as the outline extraction and normalization.

  3. 3.

    All subsequent analyses were conducted using the R statistical programming environment (RDevelopmentCoreTeam 2008).

  4. 4.

    The R code for the inverse Fourier transformation is from Claude (2008).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors for inviting me to submit this paper, as well as the two anonymous reviewers whose comments significantly improved the quality of this manuscript. Funding for the data collection was provided by the National Science Foundation (U.S.A.), grant BCS#0624962, the Kolb Foundation, (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology), and the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences and Department of Anthropology. Finally, I wish to thank Dr. Alain Turq (Musée National de Préhistoire, Les-Eyzies-de-Tayac, France) and Dr. Irina Görner (Hessisches Landesmuseum Kassel, Germany) for access to the collections from Pech de l’Azé I and Buhlen.

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  1. Forschungsbereich Altsteinzeit, Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum Mainz, Schloß Monrepos, 56567, Neuwied, Germany

    Radu Ioviţă

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  1. Radu Ioviţă
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  1. School of Archaeology, Classics &, Egyptology, University of Liverpool, Brownlow Street, London, L693BX, United Kingdom

    Stephen Lycett

  2. CRAFT Stone Age Institute, Indiana University, W. Dittemore Road 1392, Gosport, 47433-9531, USA

    Parth Chauhan

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Ioviţă, R. (2010). Comparing Stone Tool Resharpening Trajectories with the Aid of Elliptical Fourier Analysis. In: Lycett, S., Chauhan, P. (eds) New Perspectives on Old Stones. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6861-6_10

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