New Tony Baker Paper

[uniface]

Lithic Rich vs. Lithic Poor Environments.

Among his best ever, IMHO.

Lithic Environments

You'll be glad you did !

[marksimerson]

Good read! I would be in the LP area!

[mbrown1833]

this seems pretty obvious. however, it's good to find someone's written it out- especially someone of such notoriety.

[homestyle]

Very good indeed and thanks for the link!

In my view, the paper does a good job of illustrating some important considerations in the lithic technology comparison debate that shouldn't be overlooked when drawing conclusions about direct cultural affiliation of different groups of peoples by means of lithic analysis alone.

[rokdok]

In the Deep South, at least, large True Blades and Blade cores are associated with paleoindians, and i have personally found them at sites with numerous curated unifacial tools, including limaces and burins.I have personally collected artifacts from archaic and later cultures from discrete sites, in what i consider to be both lithic poor as well as lithic rich sites, and seen no evidence of True Blade technology at any of them. I have also read dozens of professionally excavated site reports as well as examined many private collections, which reinforce this opinion. I may be wrong, and if anyone down here knows of a later culture down here which produced large Blades and Blade cores, please chime in on this.

[uniface]

I'm "seeing" the same thing on that point you are, rok. I think, though, that you almost need to make the blacks blacker and the whites whiter when you're outlining a basic principle, as he's doing, for the sake of clarity. With those established, the shades of grey you find between the two extremes have a context they make better sense in.

YMMV

[leon]

Uniface, you understand what I wrote better than I do. Tony

[rokdok]

Hey, Tony, just out of curiosity, have you ever encountered a culture in the Americas which makes lanceolate bifaces from True Blades struck from Blade cores?

[uniface]

Answering out of turn here : Sure.

Ohio Lanceolates. Plano-convex in cross-section, with the bulb of percussion at the tip.

Supposedly Late Paleo, but that's conjectural.

They look like bi-beveled Midlands.

[leon]

rokdok, no I haven't. But it looks like uniface saved my bacon.